Enfreakment: The Poetics and Politics of Freak Show Legacies in US Culture

This volume examines “enfreakment” as the cultural logic through which certain bodies, characters, and traits are framed as “freakish” across US culture. Exploring the scripts that underwrite figurations of freakishness, the collection illuminates how freak-show logics persist across contemporary media and continue to shape the spectacularization of bodies, identities, and communities. Bringing together contributions on film, reality TV, fanfiction, comics, novels, and other literary works and popular media, the collection approaches enfreakment as a performative and aesthetic process through which difference is staged, circulated, and consumed. In doing so, the volume highlights the enduring cultural power of the freak-show and its legacies and explores how they continue to inform negotiations of normalcy and belonging in US culture.