Step Right Up: (Re)imagining the Freak Show in Contemporary Performance and Disability Theory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The latter half of the twentieth and early twenty-first century has seen both an exponential increase in the visibility of exceptional bodies on stage and screen, and a renewed interest in the aesthetics and history of the freak show as a performance practice. This dissertation is part of a growing field of scholarship that seeks to examine the freak show and anatomy theatre as not only a performance practice, but also as a site that has shaped contemporary notions of what constitutes “disabled,” “healthy,” “freakish,” and “normal.” The chapters in this dissertation are comprised of five case studies from contemporary visual and popular culture. The first half of this dissertation begins with the exploration of three distinct but related case studies: the 2015 production of Bernard Pomerance’s The Elephant Man, von Hagens’s Body Worlds: Pulse, and the 2016 BBC documentary Obesity: The Post Mortem. As I argue, these three sites are exemplary of what Rachel Adams describes as the freak show’s “tireless ability for reinvention” (11). My examination of these sites is two-pronged. Firstly, I consider how these sites call upon the aesthetics and dramaturgy of the freak show and medical theatre. Secondly, I consider these three sites as modern-day freak shows in so far that these sites are part and parcel in shaping and promulgating contemporary notions of what constitutes “normal” and “abnormal.” The second half of this dissertation explores the works of two contemporary artists who self-identify as disabled and freakish: Mat Fraser and jes sachse. As I argue, both artists deliberately utilize the spectacle of the freak show (and the voyeurism and curiosity associated with this spectacle) as a means of framing their own self-representation. Unlike the case studies in chapters one and two, the works of sachse and Fraser deliberately invoke the gaze as a means of not only subverting and challenging the ableist stereotypes and narratives that have emerged from the freak shows of past and present, but to reclaim and celebrate the identity of “freak.”
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.066 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".