Freakish Matters: Towards an Aesthetics of the Grotesque in American Culture

• Applicant: Dr. Susanne Hamscha
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies ; General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2013 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 244851877

My Postdoc-project 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 (by normal standards) disfigured or anomalous body, which continuously resists interpretation and explanation, in order to analyze if the grotesque body can be theorized according to its own logics and measures, beyond regimes of normalization. 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 on the film Freaks by Tod Browning, advertisements and posters for P.T. Barnum's American Museum, photographs by freak portraitists Mathew Brady, Charles Eisenmann, and Diane Arbus, lithographs by the American printmakers Currier and Ives, as well as the freaks' own cartes de visite, my project will investigate the ways in which the exhibition and display of the disfigured body, the affective relation between exhibit and audience, and the logics of a freakish bodily ontology intersect. Focusing on the social contingency and materiality of the freakish body, my project wants to devise explanatory paradigms that enable us to decipher and describe the illegible and unintelligible freakish body by shifting the frames of the human.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: USA
• Host: Professorin Rachel Adams