Seminar-Studies in Theatre (546-0-20)

Topic

Performing the Freak in Pop Culture

Instructors

Danielle Bainbridge

Meeting Info

Frances Searle Building 2370: Mon 9:00AM - 11:50AM

Overview of class

This course looks to the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, disability, and the human to answer key questions about the role of the "freak" in the cultural imagination. More specifically: What are the origins of American and international configurations of the "freak"? How did we move from "freakdom" as the embodied representation of disability and racial otherness on stage in the 19th century to the ‘freak' subcultures of the 20th and 21st century? And how has the freak been consistently used onstage, in literature, in music, and throughout pop culture as a measure of otherness and desirability? The readings for this course span from early colonial literature's fascination with the myth of the native cannibal to contemporary music's complex relationship to representations of hypersexual and gendered performances of the ‘freak' as both a mode of subjection and a potential site of attempted sexual liberation. This course integrates interdisciplinary modes of analysis in order to form a critique of archival recovery and subjectivity, what comprises the racialized, sexualized, and gendered "freak", and how these histories of performance in the latter half of the 19th and into the 21st century were inherently and intimately connected to the shifting cultural and social landscape.