- Home
- Conference Program
- COPAS
- American Studies Marburg
- Call for Papers
- Registration
- Getting there
- Accommodation
- Contact & Legal Notice
Susanne Hamscha (Göttingen):
"Bodies of Failure: Freak Shows and the Economy of the Disfigured Body"
Abstract
My proposed paper is part of my Postdoc-project, which will be situated at the crossroads of American studies, body studies, and moral philosophy, embedded within a framework of ethical questions concerning the ways human lives are framed and come to matter. More specifically, I will investigate the legibility and intelligibility of human life by scrutinizing the disfigured body, which continuously resists interpretation and explanation. To this end, I will look at visual representations of ‘freaks’ in 19th- and 20th-century American human zoos, dime museums, film and photography, as the paradigm of inexplicable bodies and unintelligible human lives.
Focusing particularly on the photography of Charles Eisenmann and Diane Arbus, my paper will suggest a conceptualization of the freakish body as a precarious life and a body of failure: I propose to conceive of freaks as bodies exposed to social crafting and form, as vulnerable and injurable lives and figures of social and cultural survival that produce cultural, social, and economic, knowledge. As a body that mocks boundaries, standards, and norms, the freak’s body furthermore fails to comply with the aesthetic and productive standards of modern society while “refus[ing] mastery” and investing in “counterintuitive modes of knowing” at the same time (Halberstam 2012: 11). In my paper, I will presume the freakish body to be a precarious life and a failure in the best sense: a life crucially determined by violent practices of exhibiting people, which offers creative and productive ways of being and knowing.
Focusing particularly on the photography of Charles Eisenmann and Diane Arbus, my paper will suggest a conceptualization of the freakish body as a precarious life and a body of failure: I propose to conceive of freaks as bodies exposed to social crafting and form, as vulnerable and injurable lives and figures of social and cultural survival that produce cultural, social, and economic, knowledge. As a body that mocks boundaries, standards, and norms, the freak’s body furthermore fails to comply with the aesthetic and productive standards of modern society while “refus[ing] mastery” and investing in “counterintuitive modes of knowing” at the same time (Halberstam 2012: 11). In my paper, I will presume the freakish body to be a precarious life and a failure in the best sense: a life crucially determined by violent practices of exhibiting people, which offers creative and productive ways of being and knowing.
Bio
Susanne Hamscha is a senior lecturer in American Studies at Georg-August-University Göttingen. In February 2012, she received her Ph.D. in American Studies from FU Berlin, where she was a member of the Graduate School of North American Studies (John-F.-Kennedy Institute). She studied English and American Studies at the University of Vienna and at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she was a fellow in the “Graduate Certificate in Advanced Feminist Studies.” This spring, she embarked on her Postdoc-project will be concerned with the American “freak show” tradition and the grotesque body. Her research interests include 19th and 20th North American literatures and cultures, popular culture, performance studies, film studies, body studies, and gender theory.