Freakery

by

Andrea Zittlau

• LAST MODIFIED: 17 April 2025
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780197768723-0014

Introduction

In the academic discourses, the term freakery refers to the phenomenon of presenting extraordinary human bodies publicly by focusing on their unusualness. The most common form of exhibition was the so-called freak show or circus side show for the paying public. However, there is a long tradition of highlighting people with unusual bodies in medical journals and lectures for an exclusive scientific audience to make a distinction between normal and abnormal bodies. The discourses in both settings often overlap, which makes the freak an interesting example for ways in which bodies that escape categorization haunt the public and academic discourse and have been used in establishing normalization. While this phenomenon is particularly observable in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a shift in the meaning of the word freak led to a new understanding during the twentieth century in which the former forms of exhibitions were historicized and the term experienced a positive transformation and has currently become a desirable form of resistance. The same can be said for the term monster, which was partially used to refer to the bodies of freak show performers. Most academic texts discussing freakery come from the US American context. However, it should be noted that freakery was and is a global phenomenon not only due to its transnational aspect of celebrity performers traveling the world, but also its occurrence in different cultural settings that provide for different approaches and discussions of the phenomenon. Furthermore, freakery is an interdisciplinary concept. Discussions come from the field of medical history, disability studies and cultural studies as well as the visual and performance arts and literature. The phenomenon of freakery is always discussed at the intersection of different disciplines as if—even in scholarship—it remains something beyond (disciplinary) categories.

General Overviews

Analyzing freakery academically begins in the late 1970s with two American literary scholars publishing independently at the same time in the form of Altick 1978 and Fiedler 1978. While Altick 1978 discusses freakery in the context of Victorian England and its entertainment culture, Fiedler 1978 is mainly interested in the psychology of fascination for othered bodies and traces the phenomenon back to Greek mythology. Shortly after, Bogdan 1988, written by another American scholar, looked at the cultural significance of othered bodies, discussing freak shows as an institution that mirrors issues in society. Taking these publications as a point of departure, the essay collection Garland-Thompson 1996 provides numerous examples that discuss in detail the relevance of individual performers and/or categories and freak show acts up until the time of publication. This cultural history approach is likewise at the core of Adams 2001, which discusses the freak in different media, also using recent examples to underline the continuity of the phenomenon, and Garland-Thomson and Chemers 2024, a follow-up on previous discussions that includes numerous recent examples and frames the phenomenon within discourses of eugenics. Chemers 2008 explores the fundamental settings and conditions of freakery, exploring the medical theater as well as the mainstream entertainment stage, focusing on the elements of curiosity and stigma. Daston and Park 2001 focuses on the period between 1150 and 1750, thus exploring the origins of freakery, and Zürcher 2004 continues where Daston and Park stop, focusing on medical history and the field of teratology, which is also at the heart of Stammberger 2011, whose take on the medical history also involves cultural philosophy. While freakery is different from the phenomenon of the human zoo or the ethnic show, as here the cultural Other is at the center of the stage, it also overlaps with those phenomena that are nicely revealed in the contributions collected in Blanchard, et al. 2008. Furthermore, all the titles listed below offer theoretical approaches to frame freakery for further study.

• Adams, Rachel. Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

  Studies the phenomenon of freakery through the different shapes it takes, and proves that it is not a phenomenon of the past. Examples draw from fictional texts, film, photography, and performances to reveal a consistency of the discourse. Furthermore, the author critically discusses previous approaches, such as Fiedler’s, to contextualize freakery in contemporary culture.

• Altick, Richard D. The Shows of London. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1978.

  Looking at practices of public exhibitions, Altick begins in 1600 and looks at the transition from the Wunderkammer (the cabinet of curiosities) to the museum, highlighting the element of class in his study. The importance of mass audiences for establishing a market for freakery in the late nineteenth century is particularly apparent in this study that also reveals the fuzzy borders between categories such as othered bodies and othered cultures.

• Blanchard, Pascal, Nicolas Bancel, Gilles Boetsch, Éric Deroo, Sandrine Lemaire, and Charles Forsdick. Human Zoos: Science and Spectacle in the Age of Colonial Empires. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2008.

  Freakery often intersects with the ethnic or cultural Other. While ethnic shows might overlap in discourse with freak shows, they nevertheless are completely different in the treatment of othered bodies. However, this anthology provides numerous examples in which enfreakment takes place in colonial contexts and ethnic Others are discussed as abnormal bodies.

• Bogdan, Robert. Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

  Departing from horror movies and the role of the villain, the author tries to understand the cultural significance of othered bodies. The book therefore conceptualizes the freak show as an institution that mirrors the concerns of its time, being particularly critical of the United States and its imperialistic ambitions.

• Chemers, Michael. Staging Stigma: A Critical Examination of the American Freak Show. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

  DOI: 10.1057/9780230616813

  Departing from Coney Island and with Goffman’s concept of stigma in mind, this book understands freakery within the framework of acting and performance and discusses medialized events such as the marriage of Charles Sherwood Stratton and Lavinia Warren Bump, both celebrities for their short stature, as well as discourses of wonder and monstrosity, and also medical theaters as settings that enable freak show performances.

• Daston, Lorraine, and Katharine Park. Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150–1750. New York: Zone Books, 2001.

  Using the category of wonder, the authors explore collecting and exhibition strategies of othered bodies in Europe from the high Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. Their approach reveals how the history of science is entangled with popular strategies of display and how othered bodies unsettle a systemic analysis of the world. Thus, the book establishes the Wunderkammer as the first form of freakery.

• Fiedler, Leslie. Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self. New York: Anchor Books, 1978.

  A cultural history of freakery focusing on the author’s own fascination with othered bodies and exploring the origin of this phenomenon in (mainly Greek) mythology. The freak show performers and their bodies become here metaphors that illustrate the process of othering in order to understand the self in psychoanalytical manner. The book is richly illustrated and inspects the voyeuristic aspect of freakery in often mystifying ways.

• Garland-Thompson, Rosemarie, ed. Freakery: Cultural Spectacle of the Extraordinary Body. New York: New York University Press, 1996.

  Comprises essays that look at the phenomenon from different angles. Primarily dealing with the construction of American national identity through othering bodies, all major authors in the field contributed essays dealing with the practices of staging and expanding the definition of othered bodies from the nineteenth century until the late 1990s, thus highlighting the continuity of the phenomenon.

• Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie, and Michael Chemers, eds. Freak Inheritance: Eugenics and Extraordinary Bodies in Performance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024.

  This volume follows Garland-Thompson 1996, choosing this time to operate within theoretical categories such as hybridity and monstrosity and looking at numerous established and recent examples in which freak show discourses linger on.

• Stammberger, Birgit. Monster und Freaks: Eine Wissensgeschichte außergewöhnlicher Körper im 19. Jahrhundert. Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript, 2011.

  DOI: 10.1515/transcript.9783839416075

  This German study focuses on the role of othered bodies in the history of sciences, particularly European medicine, in the nineteenth century. The author reveals how well-known medical practitioners such as Rudolf Virchow depended on othered bodies in their research and made use of enfreakment strategies to establish normalizing categories of the human body.

• Zürcher, Urs. Monster oder Laune der Natur: Medizin und die Lehre von den Missbildungen 1780–1914. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2004.

  This medical history of othered bodies focuses on the field of teratology beginning in the eighteenth-century, looking at discussions by Diderot, Blumenbach, and other scientists of the time that fundamentally formed an understanding of—what they called—monstrosities. The book critically examines voyeuristic tendencies in the field of medicine and explores discourses of sensationalism in original sources until the teratology loses its significance in the early twentieth century.