Staging Stigma

Staging Stigma PDF Author: Michael M. Chemers
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Examines the freak show performance tradition, using meticulous historical research and cultural criticism to change the way we understand both performance and disability.

Staging Stigma

Staging Stigma PDF Author: Michael M. Chemers
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Examines the freak show performance tradition, using meticulous historical research and cultural criticism to change the way we understand both performance and disability.

Staging Stigma

Staging Stigma PDF Author: M. Chemers
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 023061681X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 187

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Book Description
Staging Stigma is a captivating excursion into the bizarre world of the American freak show. Chemers critically examines several key moments of a performance tradition in which the truth is often stranger than the fiction. Grounded in meticulous historical research and cultural criticism, Chemers analysis reveals untold stories of freaks that will change the way we understand both performance and disability in America. This book is a must-have for serious students of freakery or anyone who is curious about the hidden side of American theatrical history.

The Wonders

The Wonders PDF Author: John Woolf
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 164313292X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
On March 23, 1844, General Tom Thumb, just 25 inches tall, entered the Picture Gallery at Buckingham Palace and bowed low to Queen Victoria. On both sides of the Atlantic, this meeting marked a tipping point in the nineteenth century, and the age of the freak was born.Bewitching all levels of society, it was a world of curiosities and astonishing spectacle—of dwarfs, giants, bearded ladies, Siamese twins, and swaggering showmen. But the real stories—human dramas that so often eclipsed the fantasy presented on the stage—of the performing men, women and children, have been forgotten or marginalized in the histories of the very people who exploited them. In this richly evocative account, John Woolf uses a wealth of recently discovered material to bring to life the sometimes tragic, sometimes triumphant, always extraordinary stories of people who used their (dis)abilities and difference to become some of the first international celebrities. Through their lives we discover afresh some of the great transformations of the age: the birth of show business, of celebrity, of advertising, and of “alternative facts” while also exploring the tensions between the power of fame, the impact of exploitation, and our fascination with “otherness.”

The Cultural Construction of Monstrous Children

The Cultural Construction of Monstrous Children PDF Author: Simon Bacon
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1785275216
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
The Cultural Construction of Monstrous Children raises important questions at the heart of society and culture, and through an interdisciplinary, trans-cultural analysis presents important findings on socio-cultural representations and embodiments of the child and childhood. At the start of the 21st, new anxieties constellate around the child and childhood, while older concerns have re-emerged, mutated, and grown stronger. But as historical analysis shows, they have been ever-present concerns. This innovative and interdisciplinary collection of essays considers examples of monstrous children since the 16th century to the present, spanning real-life and popular culture, to exhibit the manifestation of the Western cultural anxiety around the problematic, anomalous child as naughty, dangerous, or just plain evil. The book takes an inter- and multidisciplinary approach, drawing upon fields as diverse as sociology, psychology, film, and literature, to study the role of the child and childhood within contemporary Western culture and to see the historic ways in which each discipline intersects and influences the other.

Freak Inheritance

Freak Inheritance PDF Author: Michael M. Chemers
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197691129
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
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.

Theatre and the Macabre

Theatre and the Macabre PDF Author: Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 178683846X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
The ‘macabre’, as a process and product, has been haunting the theatre – and more broadly, performance – for thousands of years. In its embodied meditations on death and dying, its thematic and aesthetic grotesquerie, and its sensory-rich environments, macabre theatre invites artists and audiences to trace the stranger, darker contours of human existence. In this volume, numerous scholars explore the morbid and gruesome onstage, from freak shows to the French Grand Guignol; from Hell Houses to German Trauerspiel; from immersive theatre to dark tourism, stopping along the way to look at phantoms, severed heads, dark rides, haunted mothers and haunting children, dances of death and dismembered bodies. From Japan to Australia to England to the United States, the global macabre is framed and juxtaposed to understand how the theatre brings us face to face with the deathly and the horrific.

The Routledge Handbook of Disability Arts, Culture, and Media

The Routledge Handbook of Disability Arts, Culture, and Media PDF Author: Bree Hadley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351254669
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 834

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Book Description
In the last 30 years, a distinctive intersection between disability studies – including disability rights advocacy, disability rights activism, and disability law – and disability arts, culture, and media studies has developed. The two fields have worked in tandem to offer critique of representations of disability in dominant cultural systems, institutions, discourses, and architecture, and develop provocative new representations of what it means to be disabled. Divided into 5 sections: Disability, Identity, and Representation Inclusion, Wellbeing, and Whole-of-life Experience Access, Artistry, and Audiences Practices, Politics and the Public Sphere Activism, Adaptation, and Alternative Futures this handbook brings disability arts, disability culture, and disability media studies – traditionally treated separately in publications in the field to date – together for the first time. It provides scholars, graduate students, upper level undergraduate students, and others interested in the disability rights agenda with a broad-based, practical and accessible introduction to key debates in the field of disability art, culture, and media studies. An internationally recognised selection of authors from around the world come together to articulate the theories, issues, interests, and practices that have come to define the field. Most critically, this book includes commentaries that forecast the pressing present and future concerns for the field as scholars, advocates, activists, and artists work to make a more inclusive society a reality.

Performing Bodies in Pain

Performing Bodies in Pain PDF Author: M. Carlson
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230111483
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
This text analyzes the cultural work of spectacular suffering in contemporary discourse and late-medieval France, reading recent dramatizations of torture and performances of self-mutilating conceptual art against late-medieval saint plays.

Early-Twentieth-Century Frontier Dramas on Broadway

Early-Twentieth-Century Frontier Dramas on Broadway PDF Author: R. Wattenberg
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 023011914X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 451

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Book Description
Frontier dramas were among the most popular and successful of early-twentieth-century Broadway type plays. The long runs of contemporary dramas not only indicate the popularity of these plays but also tell us that these plays offered views about the frontier that original audiences could and did embrace.

Theatre and Human Rights after 1945

Theatre and Human Rights after 1945 PDF Author: Mary Luckhurst
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137362308
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
This volume investigates the rise of human rights discourses manifested in the global spectrum of theatre and performance since 1945. Essays address topics such as disability, discrimination indigenous rights, torture, gender violence, genocide and elder abuse.