Freak Inheritance

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson is Professor Emerita at Emory University.Michael Mark Chemers is Professor and Chair, Department of Performance, Play and Design, at the University of California, Santa Cruz.Analola Santana is Associate Professor, Department of Theatre, Dartmouth College.

• FOREWORD by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen INTRODUCTION: <"Step Right Up! A New Introduction to the Old Freak Show> " by Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Michael Mark Chemers, and Analola Santana I. STAGING 1. <"Abject Bodies in Performance Art> " by Josefina Alcazar. Translated by Analola Santana2. <"The Normativity of the Extraordinary: Musical Theatre on the Page and on the Stage> " by Stacy Wolf & Ryan Donovan3. <"Performance, Pleasure, and Profit at the Victorian Freak Show> " by Nadya Durbach4. <"Chick Webb's Extraordinary Body of Music> " by Meisha Rosenberg5. <"The Enfreakment of the Premature Infant: incubator baby shows in the United States> " by Susan Kattwinkel II. HYBRIDITY 6. <"The Tragic Journey of a Mexican Savage to the Civilized World> " by Roger Bartra. Translated by Analola Santana7. <"Rest in Peace, Charles Byrne?: The Last Testament and Enduring Legacy of the 18th Century 'Irish Giant'> " by David A. Gerber8. <"Chin Up: Befriending the Bearded Ladies> " by Lilian Craton9. <"Spectacles of Prognosis: El Niño Fidencio in the 21st Century> " by Susan Antebi III. MONSTROSITY 10. <"Monstrous Births and the Religious Imagination> " by Devan Stahl11. <"Human or Alien: Tracing Enfreaked Subjects in the 20th and 21st Century Theatre of Disability> " by Danielle Bainbridge12. <"The Mortification of Harvey Leach> " by Michael Mark Chemers IV. UNSETTLING 13. <"Freakish Fecundity: Birth and Baby Reality Television as Eugenicist Discourse> " by Katya Vrtis14. <"Alexandrine: A German Princess with Down Syndrome who Survived the Holocaust> " by Robert Bogdan15. <"Dead Weight: Exhibiting Fatness Postmortem> " by Joyce Huff16. <"Disornamentation: An Optic for Reading Depictions of Disabled, Asian Women> " by Jenna Gerdsen17. <"Sex Mad: Gender and Disability in the Art of Eudora Welty and Reginald Marsh> " Keri Watson V. LEARNING 18. <"The Pedagogical Utility of Early Freak Show Scholarship> " by Cynthia Wu19. <"Teaching the Extraordinary Body: A Generation of Freaks and Monsters in the Classroom> " by Leonard Cassuto

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."