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The spectacle of deformity : freak shows and modern British culture / / Nadja Durbach



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Autore: Durbach Nadja <1971-> Visualizza persona
Titolo: The spectacle of deformity : freak shows and modern British culture / / Nadja Durbach Visualizza cluster
Pubblicazione: Berkeley : , : University of California Press, , 2009
Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (xiii, 273 pages)
Disciplina: 791.35094109034
Soggetto topico: Abnormalities, Human - Great Britain - History - 19th century
Freak shows - Great Britain - History - 19th century
Human body - Social aspects - Great Britain - History - 19th century
Soggetto non controllato: 1847
anthropology
british culture
cannibal kings
conjoined twins
cultural otherness
cultural studies
deformity
disability
elephant man
european history
exploitation
freak show performers
freak shows
great britain
human bodies
imperial ideology
lalloo
missing link
modern history
modern identity
modern sensibilities
national identity
nonfiction
psychology
scientists
social history
social issues
social purpose
social purposes
Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Nota di contenuto: Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction / Exhibiting Freaks -- 1 / Monstrosity, Masculinity, and Medicine: Reexamining "the Elephant Man" -- 2 / Two Bodies, Two Selves, Two Sexes: Conjoined Twins and "the Double-Bodied Hindoo Boy" -- 3 / The Missing Link and the Hairy Belle: Evolution, Imperialism, and "Primitive" Sexuality -- 4 / Aztecs and Earthmen: Declining Civilizations and Dying Races -- 5 / "When the Cannibal King Began to Talk": Performing Race, Class, and Ethnicity -- Conclusion / The Decline of the Freak Show -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index
Sommario/riassunto: In 1847, during the great age of the freak show, the British periodical Punch bemoaned the public's "prevailing taste for deformity." This vividly detailed work argues that far from being purely exploitative, displays of anomalous bodies served a deeper social purpose as they generated popular and scientific debates over the meanings attached to bodily difference. Nadja Durbach examines freaks both well-known and obscure including the Elephant Man; "Lalloo, the Double-Bodied Hindoo Boy," a set of conjoined twins advertised as half male, half female; Krao, a seven-year-old hairy Laotian girl who was marketed as Darwin's "missing link"; the "Last of the Mysterious Aztecs" and African "Cannibal Kings," who were often merely Irishmen in blackface. Upending our tendency to read late twentieth-century conceptions of disability onto the bodies of freak show performers, Durbach shows that these spectacles helped to articulate the cultural meanings invested in otherness--and thus clarified what it meant to be British-at a key moment in the making of modern and imperial ideologies and identities.
Titolo autorizzato: The spectacle of deformity  Visualizza cluster
ISBN: 1-282-35997-5
9786612359972
0-520-94489-5
Formato: Materiale a stampa
Livello bibliografico Monografia
Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
Record Nr.: 9910778402703321
Lo trovi qui: Univ. Federico II
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