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，嵌入一个关于人类生活的框架和重要方式的伦理问题框架内。更具体地说，我将通过审视（以正常的标准）毁容或反常的身体来研究人类生命的易读性和可理解性，这些身体不断地抗拒解释和解释，以分析怪诞的身体是否可以根据其自身的逻辑和措施来理论化，超越规范化的制度。为此，我将着眼于19世纪和20世纪美国人类动物园、dime博物馆、电影和摄影中对怪物的视觉表现，作为无法解释的身体和无法理解的人类生活的范例。我的项目将以托德·勃朗宁的电影《怪胎》、P.T.巴纳姆的美国博物馆的广告和海报、畸形肖像画家马修·布雷迪、查尔斯·艾森曼和黛安·阿勃丝的照片、美国版画家柯里耶和艾夫斯的平版版画以及畸形人自己的参观卡片为重点，研究畸形身体的展览和展示方式、展品与观众之间的情感关系以及畸形身体本体的逻辑相交。我的项目专注于怪异身体的社会偶然性和物质性，希望通过改变人类的框架来设计解释范式，使我们能够破译和描述难以辨认和难以理解的怪异身体。

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.