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

我的博士后项目将位于美国研究、身体研究和道德哲学的十字路口，嵌入到关于人类生活的框架和实质的伦理问题的框架内。更具体地说，我将通过仔细观察(以正常标准衡量)毁容或异常的身体来考察人类生活的易读性和可理解性，这些身体不断地拒绝解释和解释，以分析是否可以根据自己的逻辑和衡量标准，超越常态化的制度，对怪诞的身体进行理论化。为此，我将考察19世纪和20世纪美国人类动物园、一角博物馆、电影和摄影中的怪物的视觉表现，作为无法解释的身体和无法理解的人类生活的典范。我的项目聚焦于托德·布朗宁的电影《怪胎》，P.T.巴纳姆的美国博物馆的广告和海报，怪胎肖像师马修·布雷迪、查尔斯·艾森曼和黛安·阿伯斯的照片，美国版画家柯里尔和艾夫斯的平版画，以及怪胎们自己的点心，我的项目将调查畸形身体的展示和展示，展览和观众之间的情感关系，以及怪异身体本体的逻辑是如何交叉的。我的项目着眼于怪诞身体的社会偶然性和物质性，想要设计出解释性的范式，使我们能够通过改变人类的框架来破译和描述难以辨认和难以理解的怪诞身体。

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.