When asked whether it was right for Gary to cash-in on his condition, Dr Haze said: "What is he supposed to do? Live at home and never go out? Captain Dan the Demon Dwarf's "magic" act includes eating live light bulbs and opening beer bottles with his eye socket. Much of his routine, however, is adult-themed and in he hit the headlines after accidentally supergluing his penis to a vacuum cleaner during a performance.
The mishap occurred after he mended an attachment needed for his act but failed to leave enough time for the glue to dry. Dan, who has been with the circus for a decade, lives on a narrow boat in Nottinghamshire with his dog. Mexican-born Jesus "Chuy" Aceves, the human wolf boy, has hypertrichosis, which means his whole face is covered in thick, dark hair.
His original high-wire walking act was adapted for the Circus of Horrors where he walks on a ladder of swords. He was the subject of a BBC documentary - It's Not Easy Being a Wolf Boy - when he shaved for the first time in the hope of getting a regular job closer to his family. Dr Haze said: "There hadn't been a wolf boy in England for years so it was a big coup to bring him over.
When he goes on stage he is a superstar - at home he's not a superstar. He tried it out but didn't really like it. He said 'this is how God has made me'. Earlier this year, Circus of Horrors was forced to advertise Jesus's job to UK applicants to comply with employment laws but no British people qualified and he was able to keep his job. About 50 people in the world have the condition and half are in Jesus's family.
As scholars of this period have widely noted, the Early Modern captivation with monstrous bodies and births constituted a re-imagining of what the monster was: No longer seen as a religious omen to be deciphered, as the medieval monster had been, by the late 16th century the monster was increasingly reconceptualized as a naturally-occurring phenomenon.
Norman Smith argues that images of the monstrous in the early 17th century reflects a shift between medieval and modern perspectives, represented by a move from an earlier fascination with monstrous races and legendary monsters, to a marked interest in "the monsters [the public] could see about them—anomalous births, strange events, occurrences contrary to nature" , p.
In this way, the Early Modern fascination with the monstrous coincides with its cultural shift from the religious to the medical domain. See also Daston and Parks, Following Marina Warner's insight in Fantastic Selves, Other Worlds , that images of corporeal transformation tend to proliferate during periods of rapid cultural change, we can identify the contemporary transformation of the freak show as similarly representative of the wider cultural shifts in dominant concepts of corporeality taking place in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Recent critics of the freak show have argued that the body of the "freak" has no essential meaning in and of itself, but is rather a stage for playing out various pressing social and political concerns Adams , Shildrick It is within this context that the recent popularity of freak shows should be understood.
The body of the modern freak show performer, and the kinds of body displayed in the space of the contemporary freak show, reveal profound changes in the shifting and unstable relationship between "normal" and "extraordinary" bodies.
The figure of the freak, like that of the monster before it, is therefore more productively understood as a catalyst for transformations of prevailing bodily norms, rather than as something which unproblematically breaches those norms.
Most noticeably, a survey of the kinds of performers featured in contemporary freak shows reveals the almost total disappearance of congenitally different bodies within the space of public exhibition.
In other words, one of the most important shifts between the kinds of bodies displayed in the 19 th - and 21 st - century freak shows is that between what is usually referred to as the "born" and the "self-made" freak.
As Robert Bogdan argues in Freak Show , these categories were used to distinguish exhibits and performers with physical or mental differences present at birth from those who "acquired their physical oddity for the purposes of exhibition" , p. Contemporary side shows tend to underplay the overwhelming predominance of "self-made" freaks amongst their performers: The Space Cowboy, the sword and other instrument swallower in the Happy Sideshow, is introduced before each performance as having an unusual internal anatomy that enables his act.
The troupe's Web site, which provides background histories of the performers similar to those delivered by the barkers of traditional freak shows, claims that the Space Cowboy has "an internal deformation known medically as congenital division of the stomach.
This basically means that the lower half of his stomach has been replicated and sits lower than a normal human stomach" The Happy Sideshow Web site, The Space Cowboy page. Similarly, Captain Frodo, the Happy Sideshow's contortionist, is said to be "affected with a rare genetic affliction known medically as Ehler Dunlos' syndrome or more commonly known as being double jointed" The Happy Sideshow Web site, The Captain Frodo page.
While a number of contemporary performers — such as Jennifer Miller and Mat Fraser — do have physical anomalies that in earlier times would have identified them as "born" freaks, for the most part congenitally, ethnically, or developmentally different bodies are no longer to be seen in spaces of public exhibition. Partly, as we have already seen above, this is the result of changes in medical technology, which have radically decreased the incidence of some congenital disorders, and led to the termination of pregnancies of a wide number of untreatable conditions see Thompson, , p.
However, this change is also due to the important recent reconceptualization of the "born" freak as "disabled. A decisive moment in the history of the contemporary freak show, identifiable as a key moment in which this transformation takes place, is the case of Otis Jordan, the "Frog Man," who performed at the Sutton Side Show at the New York State Fair. Jordan's act included using his mouth to roll, light and smoke a cigarette, continuing a centuries-old tradition of performers whose accomplishments defied physical limitations, including Madame Rosina, who was born without arms but could crochet with her feet and paint works of art with her mouth, or Thomas Inglefield, who "by industry acquired the Arts of Writing and Drawing, holding his Pencil between the Stump of his Left Arm and his Cheek and guiding it with the Muscles of his Mouth" A Curious Collection of Prodigies , p.
Jordan's performances as "Frog Man" came to an end, however, after a complaint was lodged protesting the exploitative and degrading nature of the Sutton Side Show's exhibition of disabled persons as freaks. In consequence of this complaint, the show was prohibited from using the word "freaks" to describe the performers, and the side show was relocated from the prominent midway area to the back of the fair, drastically reducing the audience and profitability of the show Bogdan, ; Adams, This case has rightly been identified as a pivotal moment in the history of the freak show, because it provides a concentrated instance of recent debates about what kinds of bodies can be exhibited to the public, and under what circumstances.
Bogdan writes:. In his discussion of this case, however, David Gerber takes issue with what he sees as Bogdan's idealistic interpretation of Jordan's situation.
Gerber questions the validity of Bogdan's argument that Jordan both consented to, and actively agitated for, his right to perform as an identified "freak. Moreover, in drawing attention to the importance of the complainant's identity in Jordan's case as Barbara Baskin, a disability activist , p. This debate is one that has continued to be a source of contention within the Disability Studies and rights movement, re-emerging in more recent responses to Mat Fraser's work.
Having first worked as a professional musician, Fraser now performs in and presents theatrical and television shows that explicitly reference traditional freak shows, a career trajectory that Fraser explicitly attributes to his "coming out" as a "disabled" performer:.
For the next few years I was in a whirl of demonstrations and actions, Disability Arts, notably the cabarets, and becoming a disabled artist, rather than an artist with a disability The Mat Fraser Web site, In a development that Gerber might neither condone nor comprehend, it is Fraser's increased involvement with disability activism that has led to his exploration of the world of traditional freak shows, through his own performance as a freak in his play "Sealboy: Freak" and his hosting of the UK television shows "Born Freak" a documentary and "Freak Out" a disability lifestyle program.
Fraser's work, however, has frequently evoked the same negative responses from disability rights advocates as did Jordan's: He was banned from the Independence Festival, which celebrates disability art, because of his involvement in the "See the Person" Government poster campaign which disability campaigners condemned for ignoring the need for civil rights legislation , and then asked not to perform at the festival due to his involvement with "Freak Out.
Underlying these debates provoked by the actions of performers such as Fraser and Jordan, and the emergence of the Disability Rights Movement itself, is a perceived tension between the medicalization and theatricalization of anatomically different bodies, one which closely informs the recent reinvention of the freak show.
This is a point raised in Bogdan's study, in which he ties the decline of traditional freak shows to the medicalization of disability. By the late s, Bogdan writes, people with physical anomalies had been transformed in the cultural imagination from human oddities or monsters to sick people requiring diagnoses and medical intervention: "The meaning of being different had changed in American society.
Scientific medicine had undermined the mystery of certain forms of human variation. People who were different had diseases and were now in the province of physicians, not the general public" , p. Rosemarie Garland Thompson also makes this point in Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature , in which she argues that the "discourse of the extraordinary body as a medical specimen finally eclipsed the traditional freak show spectacle by the mid-twentieth century" , p.
Once again, however, this narrative of the cultural decline of the freak show is one that appears as constant throughout the history of the exhibition of corporeal difference: historians of the Early Modern monstrous body, such as Colin Clair, have similarly argued that the "spread of education and greater medical knowledge" during the Enlightenment gradually led to the waning of pubic interest in "'marvels' as the woman with three breasts, the pig-faced woman, and the ubiquitous mermaid" , p.
Despite this historical interweaving of the medical and theatrical in the identification and representation of physical anomalies, there has also been a great deal of friction between the medical construction of bodily difference and its public exhibition in spaces of entertainment. Anatomical museums such as Dr Kahn's were targeted by legislators in the late s for precisely this reason: They were seen to dangerously blur the line between medical institutions, on the one hand, and theatres and side shows, on the other.
The banning of disabled bodies from freak shows is a continuation of this history. While such moves undoubtedly signal important cultural changes in the treatment of physically and mentally disabled subjects, whose treatment in 19th-century freak shows was often appalling Youngquist, , attempts to police the distinction between the medicalization and theatricalization of bodily difference pose certain dangers of their own. In particular, recent scholarship on the treatment of disabled subjects within the forum of the freak show can serve to essentialize the idea of bodily difference and the culturally constructed distinction between normative and non-normative corporealities, in a way that elides the extent to which these categories have historically served to reinforce normative and negative assumptions about bodily difference.
Ostensibly, Mutants presents itself as a work of popular science designed to elucidate the complex biological processes governing embryonic formation and development. Leroi claims that his work "resist[s] the temptation" to moralize about these processes , p. The reclamation of the category of the "mutant" signaled here closely informs the text that follows, revealing deeply entrenched but rarely interrogated assumptions about the nature and meaning of anatomical difference.
Physical anomalies are repeatedly represented as a source of danger and incoherence: "Most mutations destroy meaning," Leroi insists p. Moreover, Leroi emphatically distinguishes between "mutation" and "normal variation" p. Yet Leroi's own study repeatedly reveals how difficult it is to maintain this distinction, a difficulty the text avoids by approaching the body as though it were accessible to an unmediated interpretation. Scientific and medical analyses of the body are always cultural constructions of corporeality, a fact often obscured by their claims to empiricism and objective data.
In contradistinction to Leroi's distinctions between "normal" and "abnormal" variations of the body, Shildrick argues that monsters destabilize and problematize attempts to separate the category of the normal from the monstrous, the self from the other: "Time and again the monstrous cannot be defined to the place of the other; it is not simply alien, but always arouses the contradictory responses of denial and recognition, disgust and empathy, exclusion and identification" , p.
It is just such a dynamic that spectators and performers alike experience within the space of the freak show. Freak shows problematize the distinction between the medicalized and theatricalized body, the "born" and "self-made" freak, through the techniques of exhibition in which corporeal difference is literally staged, explicitly constructed as freakish. Moreover, resisting Leroi's attempt to define the "mutant" body in opposition to the "normal" body, freak shows demonstrate how continuous these bodies are with one another.
Just as Leroi argues that analysis of "mutant" bodies elucidates the processes of "normal" development, so do dominant cultural concepts of the body as a natural and coherent entity emerge in and through the exhibition of bodies identified as chaotic, unstable, and exceptional.
In the shift from the representation of the "born" freak to that of the "self-made" freak seen in contemporary side shows, however, we witness an important transformation in dominant cultural assumptions about the meaning and nature of the body. Reflecting its continuity with — rather than opposition to — normative models of corporeality, the contemporary freak body is a self-created construct.
Twenty-first century western culture is fascinated with processes of self-transformation and self-invention, be it the disciplining of the body within health discourses and institutions, the fantasies for self-creation enacted in television make-over programs and self-help texts, or the obsession with plastic surgery and changing body shapes demonstrated by the tabloid media.
The contemporary freak body is in this way just like the normative model of the body found in 21 st -century culture, a plastic and self-made construct, constantly transforming and re-inventing itself. However, this would ultimately prove to be his downfall when he died from swallowing a needle. He would also make several appearances as a bird creature in Tarzan movies. She lacked both teeth and hair and worked at a Coney Island sideshow until her death.
He would eventually marry in pictured , before dying at the age of 45 two decades later. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Close Search for: Search. Forgot password? Enter your account data and we will send you a link to reset your password. Your password reset link appears to be invalid or expired. Log in Privacy Policy To use social login you have to agree with the storage and handling of your data by this website.
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