The Freak Show in the United States

This work, initially titled Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit, is translated into French 25 years after its first publication in 1988. Through the careful examination of the springs of freak show, Robert Bogdan understands the evolution of American society between 1840 and 1940 in its relationship to the norm and to difference. At that time, the visit of freak show is a Sunday practice widespread among all social classes. In 1876, the Philadelphia World’s Fair and its sideshow — adjoining human menagerie — welcome ten million visitors in search of strong emotions in six months. The announcement in the introduction to the work is a joke, like the one that made the spectators who flocked to the entrance to these exhibition sites shudder in advance. Robert Bogdan warns: if he proposes an institutional analysis of freak show, it is not without passing through the heart of these demonstrations “ But don’t leave: there will be a show ! » (the original version specified “ and it will be okay to look ! »). Indeed, through multiple sources – the collection of numerous period documents (posters, banners, leaflets, advertisements, autobiographies), the analysis of testimonies from the actors of freak show (collected through interviews or exchanges of letters) — the reader finds himself immersed in the visit of freak show the most famous. Detailed descriptions, as well as the numerous photographs illustrating the work, place the reader in the position of spectator of the difference.

Monetizing pantres’ emotion

The interest aroused by freak show is proportional to the empathy, fear, or even disorientation, triggered by the scenes and the sales pitches that accompany them. Thus, costumes, sets, and personal stories play on different registers. The conventions and techniques of monster making are based on the spectator’s representation of difference. In the “ empathetic register » the spectator marvels, whether the freak illustrates extraordinary talents, or whether he accomplishes a task considered unachievable for a person with his physical or psychological characteristics, attesting to overcoming the handicap. THE “ exotic register » aims to reassure the spectator in his position of superiority, by emphasizing the difference which separates him from freak, necessarily inferior. Thus, it is the cultural identity of the spectator which guides the staging of the freaks. These subtle compositions between the characteristics of the people portrayed and the morality of the time can be readjusted during the career of a freak. At the end of the period traced by the work, when it becomes difficult for ethical reasons to continue the exhibition of disabled people, we create “ freaks artificial “. The staging of foreigners, for whom only the racist speech of the barker creates the freak, under the name of “ wild “, “ exotic natives ”, or “ circus beauties », then that of tattooed men, allows the trade to continue. The major exhibition on Black Africa at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933 and 1934 was the occasion for one of the last exhibitions, reinforcing an American position of slavery and colonialism. The inferiority and primitive character of blacks, first demonstrated by teratology, are taken up and highlighted by the banquistes (fairground artists)

The hucksters are trend spotters, their situation on the fringes of society allows them to analyze social representations and play on them, reinforcing the a priori of the “ panters » (potential spectators, who are outside the entertainment industry). While there is little contact with men from other cultures, it is easy to create stereotypes, corresponding to American foreign policy. If a majority of freaks are actors in their staging, and promoters of their own careers, profit as the primary objective also leads to the recruitment of non-consenting actors, in particular the mentally handicapped and foreigners. Thus, the freak show is the magnifying mirror of an American society in industrial expansion, down to its strongest faults. It justifies the confinement of certain people and supports the exploitation of the non-Western world by the United States at the end of the XIX^e.

The industrialization of American society through the prism of freak show

A fine analysis of the world of freak show, in the way that Becker previously did for the art world (Becker, 1982), places the entertainment industry in a historical context which allowed the institutionalization of previously isolated practices, notably with the founding in 1840 of theAmerican Museum, by the famous Barnum. The institutionalization of freak shows is made possible by the complicity of members of several influential branches of society involved in the making of monsters. Thus, at the beginning of the 1850s, Maximo and Bertola, microcephalic Central Americans, originally from El Salvador and presented as “ the last Aztecs », were received by senators, then at the White House before being examined in 1853 by the Ethnological Society, then received at Buckingham Palace during a European tour. Doctors categorize human differences, politicians invite freaks in official events, and journalists write articles about them, while members of the clergy are invited to vouch for the authenticity and interest of the freaks. This monster making is an art of commerce. Bogdan describes the bankers as “ inventors of modern advertising “. The shows take place in Barnum’s American Museum, in ten-cent museums, in sideshow circuses, in amusement parks, fairgrounds, or even at the cinema. This shows the diversity of institutions which organize the production of monsters, share the trade, ally, compete, and succeed one another according to the times.

The fairground artists then form a united community, gradually ostracized from society by the dominant morality, and assuming its marginality. Bankers describe themselves as loving adventure and being opposed to social conventions. It is the fraudulent practices used on the fairgrounds which earn them the hostility of the pantres. They openly deceive them, describing them as “ sad bastards, prisoners of routine and their narrow horizon » which must be taken advantage of – at the risk of being described as “ catechism show “. But if its actors are marginalized, the entertainment industry occupies a central place. The technical developments in photography at the end of the 1860s, as well as its retouching possibilities, made it possible to accentuate a staged element: the whiteness of an albino, the corpulence of the “ wholesale from Ohio », or the disproportionate size of the giants. The development of printing and photocopying made it possible to distribute these photos accompanied by bibliographies. When tattooed men constitute “ freaks artificial », the invention of the dermograph in 1891 – which made tattooing commonplace and almost painless – led to a reduction in the rarity of tattooed people, and therefore in their salaries. Like any industry, it is mainly economic reasons that mark the end of freak show, when its way of presenting difference is no longer lucrative.

Transformation of the paradigm of difference

The beginnings of the institutionalization of freak show are also marked by great collusion with the scientific, and particularly medical, community. Bankers and freaks exploit medical reports and other scientific commentary to generate free advertising, with the advice of doctors and psychologists cited as proof of authority. In a mechanism of reciprocal legitimation, scientists go to freak show to broaden their knowledge of human difference (medical journals use the term “ monster »). Significantly, it was on the occasion of the 1876 World’s Fair in Philadelphia that Doctor Isaac Kerlin, specialized in the education of retarded children, organized a congress which founded “ American Association on Mental Disability “.

But the progress of science and the institutionalization of the medical profession will then render the medical profession morally bankrupt. freak show. The medicalization of abnormality removes the mystery that surrounded freaks, which she also promises to eradicate. The bankers who exploited the medical vein when it benefited them, by adopting a scientific vocabulary in their sales pitches, will adapt. Sobriety wins over the descriptions of monsters while science develops, and the medicalization of disability brings a feeling that is no longer financially exploitable: pity. Monsters that still escape medical categories are highlighted with names like kezako Or nondescript, symbol of their rarity which gives free rein to the imagination. A 1908 article in Scientific America Supplement marks a break in the way of treating monsters who then deserve compassion. Designated and treated as patients, they now come under the authority of clinicians, the only ones authorized to examine them. Thus, the freaks, who for many distrusted doctors more than bankers, participated against their will in a new form of staging, this one medical. The images and descriptions which accompany them respect codes other than those of the freak show, and are recorded in medical encyclopedias, “ supposedly neutral and objective “.

New look at the medicalization of differences ?

To go against a partial representation which would like all freak have been exploited and degraded in the freak shows, Bogdan focuses on revealing the lives of humans above all. THE freak show, although he exploited the difference, he did not always exploit the individuals to whom he offered a place, provided that they agreed to take on the role of the freak. The fairground living conditions were often better than those subsequently offered by doctors to these individuals. So many people have condemned the freak show, Bogdan shows that it is through the prism of a vision of difference in which the medical field is authoritative. Published in the United States in a context of institutionalization of Disability Studies — multidisciplinary studies around the issue of disability which combine research and political activism — this work speaks out against the reduction of people to their medical definition.

In France, although protest movements going against medical and charitable visions of disability took place in the 1980s, they never led to movements such as the Disability Studies. It is here in a much more progressive way that we move away from conceptions centered on the individual to be healed. The translation of this work — by highlighting the limits of the medical-centered point of view — could contribute, twenty-five years later, to going beyond the still dominant medical position and advance thinking towards taking people into account. in their entirety.