Spectacle of Deformity

In 1847, during the great age of the freak show, the British periodical Punch bemoaned the public's "e;prevailing taste for deformity."e; 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; "e;Lalloo, the Double-Bodied Hindoo Boy,"e; 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 "e;missing link"e;; the "e;Last of the Mysterious Aztecs"e; and African "e;Cannibal Kings,"e; 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.