![]() provides a compelling counterpoint to Robert Bogdan's Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (1988). This line of inquiry directs attention to the crucial matter of how the public display of such spectacularly "other" bodies serves historically to both dramatize the limits of national belonging and project the uncanny specter of their unmaking.Īdams's Sideshow U.S.A. ![]() In their elaborations of this project, both Adams and Reiss open up lines of inquiry somewhat occluded by the identitarian critique their studies bring the national historical backdrop into the foreground and, with it, provocative questions concerning the freak show's relation to the large-scale economic, social, and cultural transformations that structure its history. Impelled by the critical interventions of disability studies, much recent work on freak shows is framed within the rhetoric of identity, using the freak's prodigious physicality to complicate a body politics conventionally-and inadequately, this criticism argues-limned as the nexus of race, gender, and sexuality. mass culture chart new theoretical territory for their topic. ![]() These distinctive meditations on the complex and contradictory logics of the freak show in U.S. ![]()
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