[課堂報告] From Wonder to Error—A Genealogy of Freak Discourse in Modernity

Introduction: From Wonder to Error—A Genealogy of Freak Discourse in Modernity



Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Rosemarie Garland Thomson (New York: New York University Press, 1996), pp.1-19.



◎ 前言：

1. The extraordinary body is fundamental to the narrative by which we make sense of ourselves and our world. (p.1)

2. The Freak Discourse's Genealogy: a movement from a narrative of the marvelous to a narrative of the deviant → “In brief, wonder becomes error.” (p.3)



◎ Singular body related to God:

1. Stone Age cave drawings, for example, record monstrous birth, while prehistoric gravesites evince elaborate ritual sacrifices of such bodies. (p.1)

2. For these fathers of Western thought, the differently formed body is most often evidence of god’s design, divine wrath, or nature’s abundance. (p.1)



◎ Secularize singular body:

1. When the gods lapsed into silence, monsters become an index of Nature's fancy or—as they now appear in genetics and embryology—the Rosetta stone that reveals the mechanics of life. (p.3)

2. By challenging the boundaries of the human and the coherence of what seemed to be the natural world, monstrous bodies appeared as sublime, merging the terrible with the wonderful, equalizing repulsion with attraction. (p.3)

3. Ambroise Pare's Des Monstres et prodigies (1573): "Pare's Des Monstres et prodigies straddles the seam between wonder and error, between marvelous and medicalized narrative of the anomalous body." (p.3)

4. The notion of the monster as prodigy fades at this junction, transfiguring singular bodies into lusus naturae. (p.4)



◎ Rationalizing singular body:

1. Milton's Lycidas seems to have initiated freak into English in 1637 to mean a fleck of color. By the seventeenth century freak broadens to mean whimsy or fancy. (p.4)

2. 1832: "Teratology recasts freak from astonishing corporeal extravagance into the pathological specimen of the terata." (p.4)

3. Domesticated within the laboratory and the textbook, what was once the prodigious monster, the fanciful freak, the strange and subtle curiosity of nature, has become today the abnormal, the intolerable. (p.4)



◎ Exhibition of freak in Victorian America (1837-1901):

1. In response to the modernity, the ancient practice of interpreting extraordinary bodies not only shifted toward the secular and the rational, but it flourish as never before within the expanding marketplace, institutionalized under the banner of the freak show. (p.4)

2. From the Jacksonian to the Progressive eras, Americans flocked to freak show. (p.4)

3. P. T. Barnum's  American Museum: wild men of Borneo, fat ladies, living skeletons, Fiji princes, albinos, bearded women, Siamese twins, Chinese giants, cannibals, midges...

4. Freak discourse structured a cultural ritual that seized upon any deviation from the typical, embellishing and intensifying it to produce a human spectacle whose somatic feature was laden with significance before the gaping spectator. (p.5)

5. Congenital anomalies and progressive or hereditary conditions yielded imaginative hybrids of the human and animal reminiscent of classical satyrs, centaurs, or minotaurs. (p.5)

6. Bodies whose forms appeared to transgress rigid social categories such as race, gender, and personhood were particularly good grist for the freak mill. (p.5)

7. Four entwined narrative forms that produced freaks:the oral spiel, the fabricated or fantastic textual accounts, the staging, and thedrawings or photographs

8.costuming, caricaturing, and naming → enfreakment

9. 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. (p.10)



◎ Modernization reconstituted the human body:

1. The change in production, labor, technology ,and market relations that we loosely call industrialization redeployed and often literally reconfigured the body, perhaps turning American's collective eyes more attentively on the extraordinary body for explanation, validation, or simply comfort. (p.11)

2. Machine culture created new somatic geographies. (p.11)

3. The freak's bizarre embodiment could assuage viewers' uneasiness either by functioning as a touchstone of anxious identification or as an assurance of their regularized normalcy. (p.11)

4. Modernization also relocated the body: "Consequently, the way the body looked and functioned became one's primary social resource as local contexts receded, support networks unraveled, and mobility dominated social life." (p.12)

5. Scientific discourse also reimagined the body, depreciating particularity while valorizing uniformity. (p.12)

6. Thus the iconography of social status transformed as the polity concerned itself with the subtleties of decoding bodies pressed toward the homogenous, even while the ideology of individualism called for distinction. (p.12)



◎ Freak show made more than freaks:

1. Parading at once as entertainment and education, the institutionalized social process of enfreakment united and validated the disparate throng positioned as viewers. (p.10)

2. A freak show's cultural work is to make the physical particularity of the freak into a hypervisible text against which the viewer's indistinguishable body fades into a seemingly neutral, tractable, and invulnerable instrument of the autonomous will, suitable to the uniform abstract citizenry democracy institutes. (p.10)

3. The freak body represented at once boundless liberty and appalling disorder, the former the promise and the latter the threat of democracy. (p. 12)



◎ The freak show broke off from respectable society:

1. This standardization of life and body under modernity was accompanied by a tendency toward compartmentalize and stratification. (p.12)

2. In democratized nineteenth-century America, class distinction solidified, bifurcating cultural discourses as well into high and low. (p.12)

3. Thus the freak show itself—which although perpetually democratic, had always vexed respectability—came to rest irrevocably at the bottom of low culture. (p.13)



◎ Freak show discourse dispersed and transformed:

1. Freak discourse did not vanish with the show, but proliferated into a variety of contemporary discourses that still allude to its premise. (p.13)

2. the high scientific discourses (genetics, embryology, anatomy, teratology, and reconstructive surgery), the elite (anthropology and ethnology) discourse, and the entertainment discourses