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Spectacle of Deformity - Freak Shows and Modern British Culture (Hardcover)
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Spectacle of Deformity - Freak Shows and Modern British Culture (Hardcover)
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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.
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