Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body.

Edited by Rosemarie Garland Thomson (New York: New York University Press, 1996. xviii plus 400pp. $65.00/cloth $24.95/paperback).

Rosemarie Garland Thomson's Freakery offers a varied and sophisticated collection of articles on a subject that academics have too often dismissed as sensational, trivial, or grotesque. Perhaps the collection's greatest strength is its recognition and insistence that "the extraordinary body is fundamental to the narratives by which we make sense of ourselves and our world," (p. 1) Much can be learned, the authors of Freakery contend, from the curious mixture of fascination and repulsion with which people defined as freaks are greeted by scholars and the general public. Building upon the pioneering efforts of Leslie Fiedler and Robert Bogdan, Freakery examines the construction and meaning of freakishness and its exhibition in Western societies, aiming at demonstrating how public displays of extraordinary bodies facilitated the definition of cultural distinctions as natural, thereby promoting a variety of social hierarchies and inequitable power relationships. Freak shows not only constituted "the freak as an icon of generalized embodied deviance," Thomson argues, but also "simultaneously reinscribed gender, race, sexual aberrance, ethnicity, and disability as inextricable yet particular exclusionary systems legitimated by bodily variation - all represented by the single multivalent figure of the freak." (p. 10)

Freakery is organized into six thematic sections, preceded by Thomson's useful and erudite introduction. To frame the essays that follow, the first section, "The Cultural Construction of Freaks," addresses issues of definition and historical development. It contains thoughtful articles by Robert Bogdan, David Gerber, and Elizabeth Grosz, each of whom offers a different disciplinary perspective on the characterization and display of freaks. The next section, "Practices of Enfreakment," contains five essays on various aspects of the freak show and its exhibitors, with subjects ranging from P. T. Barnum and Charles Willson Peale to laughinggas demonstrations and carnival sideshows. The following two sections consider the exhibition of corporeal and cultural freaks, respectively. Freakery defines corporeal freaks as individuals with anomalous or unusual physical characteristics. Of particular interest here are Allison Pingree's contribution on Daisy and Violet Hilton, Siamese twins who achieved celebrity in the early 20th-century United States, and Lori Merish's discussion of cuteness as a commodity aesthetic that mediated notions of difference in the exhibition of Tom Thumb and the films of Shirley Temple. Cultural freaks, by contrast, are persons whose "exotic," non-Western attributes suited them for presentation to Americans and Europeans as oddities or curiosities. In this section, all of the four articles point out the "early fluidity between freak discourse and the nascent project of anthropology," (p. 15) a point made particularly forcefully by Bernth Lindfors' piece on nineteenth-century British displays of Africans. Christopher A. Vaughn and Linda Frost offer especially fascinating entries in this section, both focusing on the connection between freakishness and imperialism. Vaughn explores the display of Igorots in the United States in the wake of the occupation of the Philippines, while Frost examines the political usefulness of the Circassian Beauty as a figuration of racial purity. "Textual Uses of Freaks," the fifth section, presents chapters on freaks in literature and film, and an essay on Brian Rosenberg concerning the problems and opportunities presented by teaching an undergraduate course on freaks. Finally, "Relocations of the Freak Show" considers how sideshows and dime museums have been transformed in the politically correct late twentieth century. Cecile Lindsay's provocative discussion of bodybuilding as a postmodern freak show merits special attention here, and essays on talk shows, medical documentaries, science fiction, and Michael Jackson round out the section.

If they have gotten this far in the review, some of my more traditional colleagues may begin to suspect that Freakery partakes more of the rarefied air of cultural studies than the solid ground of social history. Be not afraid. Thomson's collection has much to offer even the most sober-minded social historian, as well as the (perhaps) more adventurous devotee of cultural studies or cultural history. All of the articles are stimulating, accessible, and well-written. Few engage in anything remotely like the intellectual name-dropping and celebration of jargon that historians sometimes find so troubling in cultural studies scholarship. As a student of nineteenth-century U. S. social and cultural history, I found Freakery useful both for its fascinating content and for its methodological and theoretical contributions, which challenged me to think about familiar subjects in new ways.

My only minor reservation about the volume concerns its relentless focus on the West, and its rather scant coverage of areas other than the United States. Only three chapters out of twenty-six examine European practices or themes, and none considers how non-Western peoples and cultures interpret extraordinary bodies. Clearly, the physical conditions that signify freakishness in Europe and the United States occur all over the globe. To situate and contextualize the Western case, some mention of the meanings attributed to corporeal difference in the rest of the world might be in order. But perhaps it is unfair to take Freakery to task for what it is not, rather than recognizing its genuine innovativeness and value. Thomson's Freakery collection helps to expand and elaborate a promising field of inquiry, and adds significantly to our understanding of the articulation of corporeal and cultural difference in Western societies. Freakery merits the attention of a wide range of social and cultural historians.

Scott C. Martin Bowling Green State University