Download or read book Freak Performances written by Analola Santana and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2018-10-15 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The figure of the freak as perceived by the Western gaze has always been a part of the Latin American imaginary, from the letters that Columbus wrote about his encounters with dog-faced people to Shakespeare's Caliban. The freak acquires greater significance in a globalized, neoliberal world that defines the "abnormal" as one who does not conform mentally, physically, or emotionally and is unable or unwilling to follow the economic and cultural norms of the institutions in power. Freak Performances examines the continuing effects of colonialism on modern Latin American identities, with a particular focus on the way it has constructed the body of the other through performance. Theater questions the representations of these bodies, as it enables the empowerment of the silenced other; the freak as a spectacle of otherness finds in performance an opportunity for re-appropriation by artists resisting the dominant authority. Through an analysis of experimental theater, dance theater, performance art, and gallery-based installation art across eight countries, Analola Santana explores the theoretical issues shaped by the encounters and negotiations between different bodies in the current Latin American landscape.
Download or read book Freak Inheritance written by Michael M. Chemers and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The long-awaited follow-up to Garland-Thomson's field-defining book Freakery, Freak Inheritance illuminates the convergence of the freak show era with the eugenics era, explicating the cultural work of the freak show as a compelling range of performances of cultural and social Others that emerge as eugenic targets from the late 19th century into the 20th century and beyond. This book explores the wildly popular performances that told compelling stories about categories of people that scientific and social-scientific discourses increasingly described - and sometimes still describe - as biologically inferior. Although much work has emerged recently about the history of eugenics, this collection highlights the specific ways that modes of exaggerated commercial popular performances create a public conversation that mirrors pathological narratives of human difference that are now firmly established as the categories of normal and abnormal, healthy and diseased, beneficial and harmful. This connection between narratives of freakery and normalcy gesture towards a fuller understanding of how eugenic thinking has re-emerged strongly as a force in medical science and cultural thinking aimed at producing the supposed "best" and "most useful" kinds of people.
Download or read book Freak Inheritance written by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-08-27 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Freak Inheritance, both leading authors and emerging voices use cutting-edge disability and cultural theories to expose the operations of eugenicist thought in historical and contemporary culture. It is the follow-up to the field-defining Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (1996).
Download or read book Exploring the Cultural History of Continental European Freak Shows and Enfreakment written by Anna Kérchy and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2013-02-14 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection offers cultural historical analyses of enfreakment and freak shows, examining the social construction and spectacular display of wondrous, monstrous, or curious Otherness in the formerly relatively neglected region of Continental Europe. Forgotten stories are uncovered about freak-show celebrities, medical specimen, and philosophical fantasies presenting the anatomically unusual in a wide range of sites, including curiosity cabinets, anatomical museums, and traveling circus acts. The essays explore the locally specific dimensions of the exhibition of extraordinary bodies within their particular historical, cultural and political context. Thus the impact of the Nazi eugenics programs, state Socialism, or the Chernobyl catastrophe is observed closely and yet the transnational dimensions of enfreakment are made obvious through topics ranging from Jesuit missionaries’ diabolization of American Indians, to translations of Continental European teratology in British medical journals, and the Hollywood silver screen’s colonization of European fantasies about deformity. Although Continental European freaks are introduced as products of ideologically-infiltrated representations, they also emerge as embodied subjects endowed with their own voice, view, and subversive agency.
Download or read book Analysing Gender in Performance written by J. Paul Halferty and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-12-12 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analysing Gender in Performance brings together the fields of Gender Studies and Performance Analysis to explore how contemporary performance represents and interrogates gender. This edited collection includes a wide range of scholarly essays, as well as artists’ voices and their accounts of their works and practices. The Introduction outlines the book’s key approaches to concepts in English language gender discourses and gender’s intersectionalities, and sets out the approaches to performance analysis and methods of research employed by the various contributors. The book focuses on performances from the Global North, staged over the past fifty years. Case studies are diverse, ranging from site-specific, dance theatre, speculative drag, installation, and music video performances to Mabou Mines, Churchill, Shakespeare and Ibsen. Contributors explore how gender intersects with sexuality, social class, race, ethnicity, indigeneity, culture and history. Read individually or in tension with one another, the essays confront the contemporary complexities of analysing gender in performance.
Download or read book Canadian Carnival Freaks and the Extraordinary Body 1900 1970s written by Jane Nicholas and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Canadian Carnival Freaks and the Extraordinary Body, 1900-1970s, Nicholas offers a sophisticated analysis of the place of the freak show in twentieth-century culture
Download or read book Monsters in Performance written by Michael Chemers and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-06-01 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Monsters in Performance boasts an impressive range of contemporary essays that delve into topical themes such as race, gender, and disability, to explore what constitutes monstrosity within the performing arts. These fascinating essays from leading and emerging scholars explore representation in performance, specifically concerning themselves with attempts at social disqualification of "undesirables." Throughout, the writers employ the concept of "monstrosity" to describe the cultural processes by which certain identities or bodies are configured to be threateningly deviant. The editors take a range of previously isolated critical inquiries – including bioethics, critical race studies, queer studies, and televisual studies - and merge them to create an accessible and dynamic platform which unifies these ranges of representations. The global scope and interdisciplinary nature of Monsters in Performance renders it an essential book for Theatre and Performance students of all levels as well as scholars; it will also be an enlightening text for those interested in monstrosity and Cultural Studies more broadly.
Download or read book Understanding Disability Studies and Performance Studies written by Bruce Henderson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection brings together scholarship and creative writing that brings together two of the most innovative fields to emerge from critical and cultural studies in the past few decades: Disability studies and performance studies. It draws on writings about such media as live performance art, photography, silent film, dance, personal narrative and theatre, using such diverse perspectives and methods as queer theory, gender, feminist, and masculinity studies, dance studies, as well as providing first publication of creative writings by award-winning poets and playwrights. This book was based on a special issue of Text and Performance Quarterly.
Download or read book Fabricating the Body written by Sarah Himsel Burcon and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-03-17 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fabricating the Body: Effects of Obligation and Exchange in Contemporary Discourse is comprised of nine chapters that revolve around the body, and more specifically, issues related to identity. The text draws on a variety of criticism—including disability, gender, and psychoanalytic studies—to theorize aspects relevant to the human body historically. For example, Rachel Herzl-Betz’s “A Paratactic ‘Missing Link’: Dorian Gray and the Performance of Embodied Modernity” uses disability studies as a lens through which to examine Oscar Wilde’s literary debt to the atavistic discourse of late-Victorian freak shows. Moving forward in time, Melissa Ames’s chapter, “Bodies of Debt: Interrogating the Costs of Technological Progress, Scientific Advancement, and Social Conquests through Dystopian Literature” is a pedagogy-focused chapter. In the chapter, Ames discusses a college course in which she asked students to consider contemporary debates, such as cloning, stem cell research, human trafficking, and so forth, in tandem with fictional texts that relate these issues. Ultimately, the class wrestled with the question of: what do we do when human survival and societal progress come at extreme costs? As a whole, the text works to stimulate conversations surrounding the body, and specifically, bodies that can be labeled “indebted.” Fabricating the Body brings together issues of gender, class, and identity, and investigates ethical concerns along with topics related to marginalization and the mind/body split. Ultimately, the text situates the body as a productive space for academic research.
Download or read book Freak to Chic written by Dominic Janes and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-07-01 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this unique intervention in the study of queer culture, Dominic Janes highlights that, under the gaze of social conservatism, 'gay' life was hiding in plain sight. Indeed, he argues that the worlds of glamour, fashion, art and countercultural style provided rich opportunities for the construction of queer spectacle in London. Inspired by the legacies of Oscar Wilde, interwar and later 20th-century men such as Cecil Beaton expressed transgressive desires in forms inspired by those labelled 'freaks' and, thereby, made major contributions to the histories of art, design, fashion, sexuality, and celebrity. Janes reinterprets the origins of gay and queer cultures by charting the interactions between marginalized freaks and chic fashionistas. He establishes a new framework for future analyses of other cities and media, and of the roles of women and diverse identities.
Download or read book Monstrous Textualities written by Anya Heise-von der Lippe and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It brings together a range of critical approaches (the Gothic, monster theory, critical posthumanism, post-structuralism, postcolonialism, feminist theory, fat studies, cyborg theory) including very recent forays into posthumanist / new materialist intersections It contributes new readings to the critical canon on a wide range of critically acclaimed texts (from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein via Toni Morrison’s and Angela Carter’s work to Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy) It explores narrative strategies of resistance against systemic cultural oppression and challenges a number of critical approaches in the process
Download or read book Performance in America written by David Román and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2005-11-23 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Performance in America demonstrates the vital importance of the performing arts to contemporary U.S. culture. Looking at a series of specific performances mounted between 1994 and 2004, well-known performance studies scholar David Román challenges the belief that theatre, dance, and live music are marginal art forms in the United States. He describes the crucial role that the performing arts play in local, regional, and national communities, emphasizing the power of live performance, particularly its immediacy and capacity to create a dialogue between artists and audiences. Román draws attention to the ways that the performing arts provide unique perspectives on many of the most pressing concerns within American studies: questions about history and politics, citizenship and society, and culture and nation. The performances that Román analyzes range from localized community-based arts events to full-scale Broadway productions and from the controversial works of established artists such as Tony Kushner to those of emerging artists. Román considers dances produced by the choreographers Bill T. Jones and Neil Greenberg in the mid-1990s as new aids treatments became available and the aids crisis was reconfigured; a production of the Asian American playwright Chay Yew’s A Beautiful Country in a high-school auditorium in Los Angeles’s Chinatown; and Latino performer John Leguizamo’s one-man Broadway show Freak. He examines the revival of theatrical legacies by female impersonators and the resurgence of cabaret in New York City. Román also looks at how the performing arts have responded to 9/11, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, and the second war in Iraq. Including more than eighty illustrations, Performance in America highlights the dynamic relationships among performance, history, and contemporary culture through which the past is revisited and the future reimagined.
Download or read book Outer Space and Popular Culture written by Annette Froehlich and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-08-01 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides detailed insights into how space and popular culture intersect across a broad spectrum of examples, including cinema, music, art, arcade games, cartoons, comics, and advertisements. This is a pertinent topic since the use of space themes differs in different cultural contexts, and these themes can be used to explore various aspects of the human condition and provide a context for social commentary on politically sensitive issues. With the use of space imagery evolving over the past sixty years of the space age, this is a topic ripe for in-depth exploration. The book also discusses the contrasting visions of space from the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the reality of today, and analyzes space vehicles and habitats in popular depictions of space from an engineering perspective, exploring how many of those ideas have actually been implemented in practice, and why or why not (a case of life imitating art and vice versa). As such, it covers a wide array of relevant and timely topics examining intersections between space and popular culture, and offering accounts of space and its effect on culture, language, and storytelling from the southern regions of the world.
Download or read book Queer 1950s written by H. Bauer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-10-15 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading sexuality scholars explore queer lives and cultures in the first full post-war decade through an array of sources and a range of perspectives. Drawing out the particularities of queer cultures from the Finland and New Zealand to the UK and the USA, this collection rethinks preconceptions of the 1950s and pinpoints some of its legacies.
Download or read book The Figure of the Monster in Global Theatre written by Michael M. Chemers and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-10-09 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together international perspectives on the figure of the “monster” in performance, this edited collection builds on discussions in the fields of posthumanism, bioethics, and performance studies. The collection aims to redefine “monstrosity” to describe the cultural processes by which certain identities or bodies are configured to be threateningly deviant, whether by race, gender, sexuality, nationality, immigration status, or physical or psychological extraordinariness. The book explores themes of race, white supremacy, and migration with the aim of investigating how the figure of the monster has been used to explore representations of race and identity. To these, we add discussions on gender, queer identities, and how the figure of the “monster” has been used to explore the gendered body to finally understand how monstrosity intersects with contemporary issues of technology and the natural world. Navigating the fields of disability studies, performance-centered monster studies, and representation in performance, editors Michael M. Chemers and Analola Santana have brought together perspectives on the figure of the “monster” from across a variety of fields that intersect with performance studies. This book is essential reading for Theatre and Performance students of all levels as well as scholars. It will also be an enlightening text for those interested in monstrosity and Cultural Studies more broadly.
Download or read book Disability and Music Performance written by Alejandro Alberto Téllez Vargas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-06-12 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disability and Music Performance examines discriminatory social practices in music conservatoria, orchestras, music festivals and music competitions, which limit disabled people’s access to music performance at a professional level. Of particular interest are the disabling barriers that musicians with an intellectual, physical, sensory or neurological disability—or an acquired brain injury—encounter in the world of Western classical music, both as students and as professional performers. This book collects data in the form of semi-structured interviews and video and audio recordings to explore the voice, concerns and suggestions expressed by musicians with disabilities. It examines their perceptions of both inclusive and discriminatory practices in music institutions as well as the representation of, and audio-visual recordings by, key musical figures with disabilities. Its findings aim to contribute to the wellbeing of musicians with impairments by challenging disabling social practices that see them as inferior. This publication offers performers, teachers and researchers new perspectives for exploring some of the most common social dynamics in encounters between normative audiences, musicians and music critics, and musicians with disabilities. It invites the reader to recognise disability as a rightful identity category in music performance and to dismantle the disabling barriers that limit the participation of disabled people in music-making.
Download or read book Weird and Wonderful written by Andrea Stulman Dennett and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1997-10 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dioramas and panoramas, freaks and magicians, waxworks and menageries, obscure relics and stuffed animals . . . a dazzling assortment of curiosities attracted the gaze of the 19th-century spectator at the dime museum. Author Andrea Stulman Dennett recaptures this ephemeral and scarcely documented institution of American culture from the margins of history. 24 illustrations.
