Freaks and Geeks

This June I will be visiting Scotland and presenting a paper at the University of Edinburgh's Sensualising Deformity conference. As the call for papers explains, this conference aims to explore the overlapping spheres of sensuality and deformity:

From freak exhibitions and fairs, medical examinations and discoveries to various portrayals in arts and literature, images of deformity (or monstrosity, used separately or interchangeably depending on context) have captivated us for centuries. The result is a significant body of critical and artistic works where these bodies are dissected, politicized, exhibited, objectified or even beatified. Nonetheless, there remains a gap, an unexplored, unspoken or neglected aspect of this complex field of study which needs further consideration. This two-day interdisciplinary conference aims to bring the senses and the sensuous back to the monstrous or deformed body from the early modern period through to the mid-twentieth century, and seeks to explore its implications in diverse academic fields.

We hope to bring together scholars and students from a wide range of disciplines to engage in a constructive dialogue, network, and exchange ideas and experiences, connecting a community of researchers who share a fascination with deformity, monstrosity, and freakery.

Speakers include Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Peter Hutchings and Margrit Shildrick. Excuse me while I fan myself. This is an amazing lineup, and I would encourage anyone with an interest in monsters, deformity, freak studies and the grotesque to come along. You can register here (and it's cheaper if you do so before April 15). You can also check out the conference programme here.

[Annie Jones, Bearded Lady. Via]

My paper is entitled "That Twisted Lump of Flesh: Desire, Disgust and Deformity in Basket Case." Please feel free to attend and marvel at the wonderosity of my presentation skills.

If you haven't seen Basket Case yet, its level of low-budget excellence is difficult to adequately describe. This trailer gives you some indication.


[Warning: probably NSFW due to blood and screaming.]




Oh Dwayne.


After the conference I will be traveling to some other interesting places. One location, in particular, that is very significant to the history of the grotesque. I shan't say where - it can be a surprise...

Freaks and Geeks

A mid-week pep up courtesy of Freaks and Geeks.





Shake it; you won't break it.

Shoot the Freak

Busy writing this week. As I will continue to be for approximately lots of months. To stop this blog dying a sad death via neglect, I'm going to go ahead and share a few more of my America pics. Today's topic: Coney Island.

Be warned that many of these photos have half naked lobster/people in them. They were impossible to avoid.






Plastic tree. Purpose: unknown.











"Sure, the apartment smells like urine and the windows are broken. But just look at that view!"
































Behold: a life sized model of a woman with gastro. Liquid squirts out of her from both ends at regular intervals, accompanied by realistic retching sounds. Makes me think of Prosh for some reason.












It was a pretty dodgy place, now I think about it. Can't wait to visit again.

Marble Hornets

My brother just introduced to the YouTube series Marble Hornets, and I ended up watching the whole thing in one night. The videos are short handy-cam clips that, the story goes, are part of a huge collection of tapes made by film student Alex Kralie. I don't want to spoil the plot, but it's a clever and suspenseful example of low budget film-making.

One of the really cool things about this series is how its creators made use of interconnected YouTube and Twitter profiles to generate a sense of immediacy and authenticity as the episodes unfolded. The Twitter was updated with the 'real time' activities of the main protagonist as he investigated the mystery of the tapes. Along with the main YouTube account, there is also another account which has posted video responses that contribute to the plot and offer coded clues and threatening messages. This profile obviously 'belongs' to another character in the story, but you are never told who.

Here are the first few clips:

[Edit: you can't read the text properly in the intro when it's small, so you need to full-screen it]









The whole thing is mighty creepy, and it just gets worse from here on.

Without giving too much away, this series really explores the relationship between fear, sight, and monstrosity. The harder it is to make out the strange figure, the more horrific it becomes. This is something that is often missing from contemporary films, where representing the grotesque is often understood to be a matter of showing everything in excruciating detail.

I highly recommend checking this series out. But don't blame me if you can't go out in the dark by yourself anymore!

Freakshow

Saw the trailer for this movie the other day.



My first impression is that this is two stories stuffed into one film: 1) a story about a freakshow and all the interesting people who work in it; and 2) a story about a boy who becomes a vampire. Even the title - Cirque Du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant - reflects this division! Of the two, the former is infinitely more interesting to me than the later. I've seen enough vampire movies to last me well into my thirties. I haven't seen a 'freak' film since... well, since Freaks.


I did a great deal of 'freak theory' reading for my first chapter on celebrity grotesques. The term 'freak' is often discussed in relation to disability studies, as physical difference is key to the visual display of the freakshow. Racial 'Others' also made frequent appearances - although many were simply African American locals dressed up as 'cannibals' or 'savages' to titillate the white audience.

Theory frames the freakshow as a spectacular display of otherness that serves to reinstate the boundaries of the 'normal.' Rosemarie Garland Thomson's Freakery: cultural spectacles of the extraordinary body is a great read for anyone interested in the topic. One of the most interesting parts, for me at least, is her discussion of 'enfreakment.' This term encompasses the myriad of elements that contribute to the construction of an individual as a 'freak':

"Enfreakment emerges from cultural rituals that stylize, silence, differentiate, and distance the persons whose bodies the freak-hunters or showmen colonize and commercialize. Paradoxically, however, at the same time that enfreakment elaborately foregrounds specific bodily eccentricities, it also collapses all those differences into a 'freakery,' a single amorphous category of corporeal otherness. By constituting the freak as an icon of generalized embodied deviance, the exhibitions 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. Thus, what we assume to be a freak of nature was instead a freak of culture" (p10).

I like this because it shows that 'freak' is not an innate status, but an entirely contextual category into which certain individuals are placed by virtue of the technologies of representation that surround them.

Rachel Adams' Sideshow U.S.A: freaks and the American cultural imagination is another good book on the topic, while Mary Russo's The Female Grotesque has a chapter on Tod Browning's Freaks (which you can watch in full on YouTube).

Of course, identifying as a 'freak' is also a way of announcing one's alternative lifestyle and/or total groovyness these days.



And then there's this:



"I've never seen myself with a beard before."

That's what they all say.