Enfreakment as an Invective Mode in US-American Popular Culture

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This project aims to (re-)conceptualize enfreakment as a longstanding, malleable, and powerful practice in US-American popular culture. It proceeds from the assumption that the processes of enfreakment, i.e. the processes by which figures of the ‘freak’ are constructed and staged, can be understood as one, particularly powerful formation of an invective popular culture – of a commercial mass culture that generates popular appeal out of performances of disparagement and debasement, whose invective valences are constantly reflected on in the culture itself. Approaching enfreakment in the context of such invective practices promises new insights both into the extensive, multifaceted culture of freakery, and into invective traditions and dynamics in US-American popular culture. Against this backdrop, the project addresses enfreakment as a process that can be observed in several genres, media, and historical constellations. It approaches these processes as performative procedures that construct as deviant certain, always historically situated instances of bodily non-normativity, and that sensationalize this ‘deviance’ and charge it with societal meanings. The project wants to examine these processes in two genre(-clusters) that span across multiple media and historical constellations, and that are quite different on their surfaces: 1) a cluster that can be described as regional exploitation – novels, films, and tv-formats that, in a sensationalizing manner, stage rural regions and their inhabitant as deviant; and 2) the genre of superhero fiction which, in constructing its ‘superheroes’ as well as its ‘supervillains,’ regularly draws on freakery-related registers of deviance. The project’s research design uses impulses of modal criticism along with concepts of performativity to explore the processual character of enfreakment. In addition, it draws on a cultural concept of disparagement, especially to bring into focus how reflections on the disparaging valences of enfreakment tie pop-cultural instances of enfreakment to broader societal negotiations of social norms and normativity.