TY - BOOK ID - 77877996 TI - Spectacle of deformity PY - 2010 SN - 1282359975 9786612359972 0520944895 9780520944893 9781282359970 9780520257689 0520257685 PB - Berkeley University of California Press DB - UniCat KW - Human body KW - Freak shows KW - Abnormalities, Human KW - Body, Human KW - Human beings KW - Body image KW - Human anatomy KW - Human physiology KW - Mind and body KW - Sideshows KW - Abnormalities KW - Anomalies, Congenital KW - Birth defects KW - Congenital abnormalities KW - Congenital anomalies KW - Defects, Birth KW - Deformities KW - Developmental abnormalities KW - Human abnormalities KW - Malformations, Congenital KW - Morphology KW - Pathology KW - Teratogenesis KW - Teratology KW - Social aspects KW - History KW - Malformations KW - Exhibitions de monstres KW - Corps humain KW - Histoire KW - Aspect social KW - 1847. KW - anthropology. KW - british culture. KW - cannibal kings. KW - conjoined twins. KW - cultural otherness. KW - cultural studies. KW - deformity. KW - disability. KW - elephant man. KW - european history. KW - exploitation. KW - freak show performers. KW - freak shows. KW - great britain. KW - human bodies. KW - imperial ideology. KW - lalloo. KW - missing link. KW - modern history. KW - modern identity. KW - modern sensibilities. KW - national identity. KW - nonfiction. KW - psychology. KW - scientists. KW - social history. KW - social issues. KW - social purpose. KW - social purposes. KW - History of civilization KW - anno 1800-1899 KW - Great Britain UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:77877996 AB - 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. ER -