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Freak Inheritance Eugenics and Extraordinary Bodies in Performance

Eugenics and Extraordinary Bodies in Performance

By: Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (Editor), Michael Mark Chemers (Editor), Analola Santana (Editor)

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Paperback | 27 September 2024

At a Glance

Paperback
352 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
23.6 x 15.8 x 2.2

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$77.75

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The long-awaited follow-up to Garland-Thomson's field-defining book Freakery, Freak Inheritance illuminates the convergence of the freak show era with the eugenics era, explicating the cultural work of the freak show as a compelling range of performances of cultural and social Others that emerge as eugenic targets from the late 19th century into the 20th century and beyond. This book explores the wildly popular performances that told compelling stories about categories of people that scientific and social-scientific discourses increasingly described - and sometimes still describe - as biologically inferior. Although much work has emerged recently about the history of eugenics, this collection highlights the specific ways that modes of exaggerated commercial popular performances create a public conversation that mirrors pathological narratives of human difference that are now firmly established as the categories of normal and abnormal, healthy and diseased, beneficial and harmful. This connection between narratives of freakery and normalcy gesture towards a fuller understanding of how eugenic thinking has re-emerged strongly as a force in medical science and cultural thinking aimed at producing the supposed "best" and "most useful" kinds of people.

Industry Reviews

"legacy of 'freaks,' those whose bodies do not conform to the cultural norms that define appearance and social value. Both an overview of eugenics, which aims to normalize and regulate bodies and their range of performances, and forms of morphological resistance to eugenics, this is an original and forceful collection on the capacities of extraordinary bodies for creation and defiance, and the external forms of constraint and containment that regulate many of them. Bodies resist what we make of them - they are what they become, whether we understand or identify with them or not. This book addresses such resistance as much as it does this containment."" -- Elizabeth Grosz, author of The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics and the Limits of Materialism

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