Abstract
Cultural representations of the Freak Show

At the intersection of the histories of disability and entertainment is an important yet infamous cultural phenomenon – the freak show. The rippling effect it had on social attitudes towards the extraordinary body affects my impulse to take a closer look at what it was actually like to attend one, what it looked like and how it felt. On the journey to gather as much visual information as possible, I started off by looking at Google Images results and ended up at an actual contemporary freak show, exploring imaginations rendered in video games and talking to residents of Gibsonton, Florida along the way. The choreographies, spatiality and decor of the historical ancestor of the reality show vary from case to case, especially when filtered through pop cultural reimaginings of the original circus sideshow. Most importantly, a variety of performers had graced its stages — each one of them with two biographies, the real one and the fake backstory, created to emphasize their impact on the audience. This journey through images of spaces, animations, compilations of ebay-hunted portraits and modern day performative reenactments attempt to give a glimpse of a long gone tradition that was as much discriminating as it was emancipatory.

Keywords: freak show, otherness, performance, disability