Rare, Beautiful, Disturbing

First: a reminder that there are only 10 days to register for the conference at the reduced rates. Advanced booking closes on 15 April, and we urge you to take advantage of this offer before it does: see the Fees and Information tab for details and links to the booking website.

Now, we'd like to thank one of our Twitter followers for the following link to Wired Science's sneak peek at the very recently released book Hidden Treasure. The book provides a brief glimpse into the unfathomable depths of the National Library of Medicine's extensive collection as part of the NLM's 175th anniversary celebrations. The Wired Science preview is comprised of images, film rolls, or texts which are distinguished by being rare, beautiful, and disturbing.

The cross-section is an intriguing one, and perhaps indicative of the close-knit relationship between the sensational, and the beautiful/disturbing. A mummified and mutilated hand from Eugène-Louis Doyen's Atlas of Topographic Anatomy (1911), its lines pronounced and severed, seems to be the visualised anticipation of some grotesque touch; the presence of a similarly disembodied hand clutching the shoulder of a bandaged patient in Joseph Jacob-Henri's sketch from Complete Study of the Human Anatomy (1831-54) perverts the reassurance of bodily contact.

The book itself, according to the publisher's description, is an exhibition of objects that 'glow with beauty, grotesquery, wit and/or calamitous tragedy'. Edited by Michael Sappol, the collection includes 'a series never before reproduced of hauntingly delicate paintings and illustrations of “monstra” collected in the early decades of the nineteenth century “from the museum of Dr. Klinkenberg” in the Netherlands; charming hand-painted glass “magic lantern slides,” which doctors projected in slideshows to entertain and help cure inmates at St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Insane; the mimeographed report of the Japanese medical team first to enter Hiroshima after the atomic blast'.

The illustrated "monstra" are exhibited alongside disturbing images of inhumanity, and the anatomical reality of our bodies themselves. The collection also includes x-rays from Adolph Hitler's medical records, illustrations of a man so often deemed monstrous that are unnervingly devoid of the bodily monstrosity depicted elsewhere in the collection. Each treasure is accompanied by a brief essay from distinguished scholars, artists, or physicians, including Lisa O'Sullivan, Mark S. Micale, Jeffrey S. Reznick, Benjamin Reiss, Shigehisa Kuriyama, Susan E. Lederer, and Rosamond Purcell, among many others.

Monsters and the Monstrous

As excited as we are for the launch of our conference registration, we know that the level of interest the event has generated since September far exceeds the number of people who will be travelling to Edinburgh in June. While we hope to see as many of you at the conference as can make it, we also want to continue providing resources support for those of you who can't.

Which is why we are also excited to announce the publication of The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, edited by Asa Simon Mittman. This sensational book looks to be a landmark release in the field of monster studies, and features essays by conference keynote Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (who brought the collection to our attention), as well as Patricia MacCormack, John Block Friedman, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, Dana Oswald, Debra Higgs Strickland, Karl Steel, and Peter J. Dendle.

Sufficiently weighty, both in mass and in content, from the looks of the table of contents and available excerpts, to justify the list price, there seems little doubt that the Companion will become a stable of monster researchers' libraries everywhere. In an emerging field of study, we can't help but gleefully imagine the shock and awe it will inspire in newly inducted students as it works its way into core course syllabi.

On a lighter, and more literary, note, we would also like to point out that this week marks the "12 Days of Monsters" on the Weird Fiction Review website. Posts by Jeff VanderMeer and Nancy Hightower have already touched on China Miéville, and throughout the whole week Pretty Monsters, a novella by Kelly Link, is available, as is a free download of VanderMeer's own Monstrous Creatures collection. Well worth keeping an eye on as the week unfolds!

Of course, a reminder that registration, travel, and accommodation info can now be found on the "Fees and Information" page here.

Conference Registration Now Live!

We are very excited to be able to announce that conference registration is now live! We are currently offering reduced advanced booking which will be available until 15 April, after which time the rates will revert to the standard prices. Of course we encourage you to take advantage of the advanced booking rates while you can!

You can register for the conference here. The preliminary conference programme is available here, and information regarding travel to and accommodation in Edinburgh can be found here.

Advanced booking rates (currently online) are as follows:

• Advanced day-fee (unwaged) - £35
• Advanced day-fee (waged) - £50
• Advanced full-fee (unwaged) - £55
• Advanced full-fee (waged) - £85

The standard booking rates are as follows:

• Day-fee (unwaged) - £50
• Day-fee (waged) - £65
• Full-fee (unwaged) - £70
• Full-fee (waged) - £100

Day-fee bookings will include access to the conference on the chosen day, as well as access to any additional events which may take place on that day. Please note that conference-related events on days for which you have not registered may carry a small separate fee.

Full-fee bookings include access to all conference events on both days as well as to the conference itself.

Information regarding such external conference events, including a conference dinner, will be made available nearer to the event itself. Please don't hesitate to contact us via e-mail at sdefconference(at)ed.ac.uk if you have any questions or concerns regarding registration.

Monstrosity of the "Flesh" - Diederik Klomberg

By way of apology for our continued silence this month, we would like to make a peace offering in the form of a stunning piece of film art by Netherlands-based Diederik Klomberg: Flesh. For more of Klomberg's work, visit his website.

This 8-min short film offers what almost feels like a complete sensual envelopment, the soundtrack alone evoking a sensation perhaps akin to being bathed in amniotic fluid. The womb-like audio experience is paired alongside a mesmerising transformation of flesh as clitoris becomes ear, becomes bellybutton, becomes nipple. The film is a seamless mutation of the body in which folds, crevices, orifices, and unbroken skin melt into one another with a recklessness abandonment of the traditions of human form.

Flesh is a cinematic creation of the monstrous body in pieces, the body that is always already in the process of becoming both itself and its fleshly other. Each dissected, high definition pound of flesh becomes as alien as the Elephant Man's tumorous excess, or one of H.G. Geiger's biomechanical creatures. Each image is carved out of the healthy body to take on a life of its own; the breathing, pulsing soundtrack is not that of the body in-toto, but of a new, foreign body that quivers and grows as sphincters expand and an expanse of smooth skin crumples into canyons.

Since we are in the process of setting up registration and putting together a preliminary conference schedule, updates may be few and far between yet (although we hope to see a change in that pattern soon). Until then, treat yourself for about 8 minutes. There's really nothing quite like getting lost in a rolling tide of flesh and finding yourself confronted with the glorious monstrosity of a perfectly normal nostril.

Fantastic Films, Fantastic Bodies

Our deepest apologies for the delay in posts; naturally we have been stunned into silence by the quality and volume of the proposals we have received in the last few weeks (and months). There's still a few days left to submit your abstracts - see the call for papers for details - so we hope to see a few more yet.

We'd also like to hopefully make up for our blog silence by bringing your attention to a very interesting article published in 2006 in Offscreen - David Church's "Fantastic Films, Fantastic Bodies: Speculations on the Fantastic and Disability Representation". The article offers an exploration of representations of disability in films whose potential to render "positive critical readings and powerful depictions of disability" has often been neglected. In fact, the "fantastic" films that form the basis for Church's discussion - namely Freaks (1932), Edward Scissorhands (1990), and Videodrome (1982) - are more likely to be the focal point for negative criticism regarding their depictions of exceptional bodies than anything else, and in the case if Freaks this has typically been the case.

Church opens by addressing such criticism, emphasising the importance of genre in influencing the way that such representations are read. He notes that

'Although fantastic films stimulate the imagination, many of them also stimulate the body itself through the devices common to “body genres” (i.e., horror, porn, and melodrama); Hawkins, for example, notes the predominance of body genre affect in art-horror, avant-garde films, and various “paracinematic” films that easily classify as fantastic. With the direct appeals to the viewer’s body made by these “low” fantastic texts (not unlike the fearful and tearful affect sought by freak show practitioners showcasing “monstrous,” exotic, sexually ambiguous, and pitiable human specimens), perhaps it is not surprising that they have been ignored by disability studies scholars seeking to displace the site of disability away from the material bounds of the corporeal body... [however,] disability studies focuses its probing and analytical gaze upon the “proper” (or “normal”) body of social realist films, largely ignoring the “grotesque” and “improper” (or “abnormal”) body of fantastic films, leaving a conspicuous gap in the discipline’s critical discourses'

Offering a lengthy dissection of three "fantastic" cinematic representations of extraordinary bodies, Church raises some intriguing questions regarding the legitimacy accorded or denied portrayals of disability based often primarily on the basis or exclusion of the context within which the portrayal is presented. He concludes by considering that 'the imaginative framework of the fantastic film moves the grotesque disabled body from the margins of representation and into the spotlight, much like the freak show performer on stage: an exploitative spectacle for sure, but one which might inadvertently point back toward our own cyborgian mode of spectatorship.'

"Freaky" terminology in Google's Ngram Viewer

Just a short post today about something that one of the conference organisers has been playing around with in liu of facing actual work. If you've encountered Google's Ngram viewer before then perhaps you have already thought to input the various words typically associated with the extraordinary body throughout history to see what you get. If not, then we'd like to share the following:

This graph represents the use of different terminology over time (from 1700 - 2000) as found in Google Books' digitized collection (click on the image for the full size, click on the in-text link for the details of search criteria or to run your own).

Breaking that down into labels which might, historically, have been associated with, or at least which now tend to be associated with historical/cultural conceptions of, extraordinary bodies - namely "monstrous," "deformed," "disabled," and "freak" - suggests some surprising trends in usage.

Below are a series of related breakdowns.

Sins Invalid: Disability and Sexuality

This post is going to be a two-for-one deal, to make up for the fact that we've still not gotten quite back into our usual routine of 2-3 posts each week.

First, we would like to draw your attention to a project based in San Francisco but which is thankfully reaching its way across America and the Atlantic - Sins Invalid. The project itself is a performance-based initiative which  "incubates and celebrates artists with disabilities," according to the website's description, "centralizing artists of color and queer and gender-variant artists as communities who have been historically marginalized from social discourse."

What is even more exciting is that they are currently in the final stages of production on a 41 min film that reflects the project itself: Sins Invalid: An Unshamed Claim to Beauty. The film is designed to, as they phrase it, "serve as an entryway into the absurdly taboo topic of sexuality and disability," a notion which pertains particularly to the aims of the conference, so naturally we are very excited to see the final result! The project is still looking for funding through a kickstarter campaign in order to complete the last details of production, and they offer incentives depending on your donation. As with any Kickstarter fundraising scheme, your donation only goes through if they reach their goal, and we certainly hope they do, so please check out their campaign and their website, and if you're lucky enough to be in the area, seek out one of their performances!

The second piece of news we have is more relevant for those of you in the Edinburgh area (or who might be in the Edinburgh area at some point). The Surgeon's Hall Museum will be open 12-4pm on weekends once more starting 31 March and lasting all the way until October. We can very much vouch for the quality of the museum, and it is well worth a visit. It could be a fantastic Saturday day-trip; not enough day-trips feature pathological anatomical specimens, and the team behind Sensualising Deformity thinks it's time to change that!

Freakery and "Aesthetic Traces"

If you happen to be interested in "freaks," freakery, and its relationship to nineteenth-century medical "monsters", we'd like to draw your attention to a fascinating article published in 2005 in the Disability Studies Quarterly, Sheila Moeschen's "Aesthetic Traces in Unlikely Places: Re-visioning the Freak in 19th-Century American Photography". The article, which is open access, offers an intriguing reading of the role that photography played in the creation and presentation of extraordinary bodies in the nineteenth century; Moeschen denies that fictive division which might separate the objective medical photograph from its public side-show counterpart, typically deemed to be more deliberately titillating. Instead, she suggests,

"The two traditions form a reciprocal relationship that illuminates their representational and political imbrications. The historical persistence to delineate between a medical and artistic "aesthetic" reveals a disconcerting bias towards privileging the power and credibility of the empirical realm over the artistic."

Moeschen points to the role that "sensation" played in separating the clinical photograph of medical monstrosity from the "freak portrait", evoking perhaps a distinction between the sensational props and posing of the visual construction of freakery with the potentially sensualised medical photographs which are marked by their nudity in order to reveal the anomalous body more fully to the viewer.

The article focuses on what Moeschen calls the "performative trace," which she sees as characterising the construction of both medical and sensational photographs of individuals with extraordinary bodies, creating "an alternate frame around these subjects that explicitly signals the perceptual and cognitive apparatuses ascribed to performance." She notes that

"The performative trace becomes another presentational "mode" employed, ironically in the case of the medical profession, to disarm these unusual bodies, endowing them with a quality of the ephemeral that ultimately promotes uncritical fascination; it promotes a kind of fetishistic voyeurism and illicit titillation."

The instability which this theatrical element introduces into these photographs is, for Moeschen, a deliberate strategy on the part of both medical and sideshow photographers to manipulate the "cultural and ideological value" of their subjects.

Welcoming 2012 (a wee bit late)

We are back! Hello, and happy new year, and our deepest apologies for such a long silence. It had been our intention to post a little bit over the holidays, but like most holiday goals we fell short and were lost in a well-spiced mulled-wine abyss for much longer than we expected.

However, to kick off the year we'd like to draw attention to a kind of companion post which ties in surprisingly well to our last post of 2011. This article by Susan Dominus was brought to our attention recently and seemed rather appropriate given the news we brought you around Christmas time of the successful birth of conjoined twins Jesus and Emanuel in Brazil.

Dominus' article, (and warning, it is quite a long-winded one), focuses on conjoined twins Krista and Tatiana Hogan in British Columbia, Canada, who, as craniopagus conjoined twins, raise quite a different question regarding subjectivity and separation. In many ways, the interest isn't any different from the traditional obsession with conjoined twins' shared experience and exactly how far it extends - experiments exploring shared sensation never seem to change much beyond the pinching and prodding of first one twin and then the other. However the notion of a thalamic bridge does seem to offer a uniquely complex set of questions regarding Krista and Tatiana's development and the prospects for their future identity.

The article also raises and glosses over some of those aspects of life as conjoined twins which have historically always seemed to hover in the shadows. While she specifically refers to the family's refusal to subject the twins to unnecessary medical study (“If one of them needs it for their health, by all means, they can do what they need to do,” said their step-grandfather... “But I’ll be damned if you’re going to poke and prod and experiment on them”), she also makes extensive reference to the response of the medical community to the discovery of the supposed thalamic bridge.

Similarly, the article appears to emphasise the girls normality, almost going so far as to suggest an absence of any spectacular element in their public lives (“Guests might have looked for a half-second longer than they ordinarily would, but they invariably smiled at the sight of the girls’ evident glee, just as they would at any other two small children”) and yet refers not only to the fact that the girls have been the subject of a documentary (on the National Geographic channel, to be precise), but also rather glossing over the family's pursuit of a reality television show.

This endeavour seems to be inspired by talent manager Chuck Harris, who in this interview is titled a “freak wrangler, manager and talent agent ”, and who refers to himself as  “the conductor of a symphony of wackos... When you need something strange and eye-popping and nobody knows where to look, I’m the guy to find it for you.”

While the idea that the twins may share more than just physical sensation is a fascinating one, and no one seems to deny that it poses brand new implications for understanding subjectivity and a sensed embodiment, their labelling on the part of one neuroscientist as “a new life form” and their engagement with a self-identified “freak-wrangler” seem to raise some unfortunately more familiar ghosts of the past.

Conjoined Twins in the News

This post isn't strictly tied to the theme of sensualising deformity, but given the extraordinary nature of the case and the time of year I felt that it warranted sharing. A pair of conjoined twins of the most rare degree, dicephalic parapagus, where two fully formed heads share a single body, including internal organs, have been born in Brazil.

The amazing thing about this is the fact that both the babies and the mother are alive and, we can assume, healthy. Obviously whether their condition will impact on their development remains to be seen, but at the moment it is simply wonderful that these two boys have survived to term and have been born without any apparent complications.

Perhaps the more disturbing note here is the article's insistent emphasis on separation, which has arisen in spite of the fact that doctors admit it to be impossible; separation in this instance would be "removal", selection one of the children to deliberately kill. That the conversation is taking place despite both twins exhibiting normal brain function and with no visible threat posed by one twin to the health and survival of the other is somewhat unsettling to say the least, but not surprising. To what degree does the assumption that separation is a given play in to legitimate medical concerns, and to what degree does it reflect the same anxieties of human form and human subjectivity which have always plagued conjoined twins?

Today, however, with the twins born only a few days before Christmas and Hanukkah, and right in the midst of the winter holiday season, we'd just like to wish them, and you, all our best. 

Sensuality as Disability - Victorians and Precocious Puberty

Since this week (22 November to be precise) marked the start of Disability History Month here in the UK, we thought that it was a  good time to draw your attention to a special issue of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies from 2008, which explores the subject of "Critical Transformations: Disability and the Body in Nineteenth-Century Britain". Best of all, the issue, guest edited by Mark Mossman and Martha Stoddard-Holmes, is available free online in full.

Pieter Paaw, "Skeleton and Skull of a
Child." (1633), © University of Toronto
Library, 2003 

The journal offers a number of interesting articles exploring the intersection of gender and disability, such as Joyce L. Huff's "The Domesticated Monster: Freakishness and Disability in Fitz-James O'Brien's 'What Was It?'". Yet what is perhaps most interesting within the context of this conference (and this blog) is the inclusion of M. Jeanne Peterson's "Precocious Puberty and the Victorian Medical Gaze".

Peterson's article considers the responses on the part of Victorian medical reports to cases of precocious puberty and the way that they were tied to anxieties surrounding conceptions of gender, bodily normalcy, even the state of childhood itself. In so doing, she demonstrates, to quote Mossman and Stoddard-Holmes's introduction to the issue, "the fecundity of visual and structural disruptions of “normal” masculinity and femininity for narratives of pathology and normalcy." The introduction goes on to note that the article

"work[s] on the continuum on which the normal and the extraordinary both reside, noting the various points (and convergences) of discomfort, apprehension, attraction, and wonder these “extraordinary cases” produce"

In consciously choosing to place early-onset puberty within the discourse of disability, Peterson acknowledges that her decision may raise some questions, given that,

"precocious puberty would seem more a case of early ability rather than disability. But early puberty can also be understood as deviance, as straying from norms of bodily development. In the phenomena of early puberty doctors found amazement, desire, and dread."

In Peterson's study, then, the precocious development of physical markers of puberty, those undeniable indicators of the body's eroticism, its sensuality, become in and of themselves an illustration of disability. This definition of the preciously pubescent body would seem to bind Victorian constructions of disability, of exceptional bodies, to the sensual body in a way which is often overlooked. Sensuality here stands at the very core of disability, in stark contrast to a traditional conception in which the senses,  if not deliberately removed, are at the very least forgotten.

A Monster Observatory

One of our keynotes, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, shared this fantastic link with us via his Twitter account, and we wanted to pass it along to our readers as well (share and share alike - it's a good motto).

With a name like A Monster Observatory and a tagline that runs "Cultural Teratology: Freaks, Monsters, the Grotesque", it should be pretty clear why we've taken an interest in this blog. However, if you needed convincing, we would refer you to the most recent post as of today, "Thinking About Monster Theory (Seven Theses)" - ten points if you can guess what it is about.

The site is managed by Dr Ian McCormick, and so far features a wealth of posts on mangled torsos, disability and the fourth plinth, and conjoined twins amongst other topics - in other words, every fascinating aspect of monstrosity, disability, and the grotesque body. If you're reading this blog, then A Monster Observatory probably deserves a spot on your bookmarks toolbar.

We'd also like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that we do acknowledge all inquiries and submissions, so if you have sent in a proposal or a question and haven't heard back, do get in touch. Likewise if you think there's something that our blog readers might find interesting or useful - articles, books (ideally available online), art or museum exhibitions, other blogs, even other conferences. You can send it our way via e-mail, Facebook, or Twitter (all information on the sidebar to your right). Pick your poison - we'd love to hear from you on any platform!

Code of the Freaks: forthcoming feature-length documentary

We were quite interested to hear about the upcoming film, Code of the Freaks. The feature-length documentary being developed by a group of film-makers based in Chigago aims to explore the depiction and construction of disability in Hollywood movies. Their website sets out the film as "an irreverent project" seeking to "stimulate critical discussion among diverse movie lovers. Tracing themes of representation from the 1920's to the present, we examine how movie images shape the public's understanding of disabled people":

Production still from Code of Freaks

"Audiences have internalized these coded images. Their narratives are ultimately projected onto disabled people in everyday life. It’s hard to find a disabled person who doesn’t have an absurdly ridiculous story about experiences with total strangers while simply walking down the street. These experiences to a great extent mirror what the public learns about disability through movies.
Our goal is to produce a feature-length documentary that will deconstruct, lampoon, and critique uses of the disabled character in film... Our process involves conducting these discussions with diverse disabled and non-disabled audiences to learn just how images of disability shape the social consciousness of disability."

The project also involves several events, public discussions organised around themes illustrated by Hollywood film montages cut with critical questions. Each month, the project's blog will feature a clip about a selection of films, and a trailer is already available online.

The film will no doubt offer a fascinating exploration into the larger cultural representation of disability as well as the Hollywood depictions, and hopefully will raise some discussion about the mutual influence that the two have on historical and contemporary constructions of disabled bodies. We would be especially interested to consider what role the sensualisation/eroticisation of extraordinary bodies might play in these filmed representations, if at all, and its significance.

Curious Pursuits Exhibition, Manchester

For the Victorianists amongst you, we would like to direct attention to a new Art Historian collective based in Manchester, Porter & Jenkinson. Their mission statement should prove intriguing not just to scholars focusing on the nineteenth century, but also artists, art historians, and those interested in the medical humanities:

Vegetable Lamb from The Museum of Garden History, London

"Art Historian collective Porter & Jenkinson aim to showcase the best contemporary art of a curious and unusual nature. Through exploring the dark, strange and depraved themes of the Victorian era they curate exhibitions of works that respond directly to these ideas. They intend to bring to the foreground these forgotten aesthetics and to explore the responses and reactions in contemporary society."

Porter & Jenkinson's first exhibition, Curious Pursuits, will be taking place from the 2-29th February 2012 at the Portico Library in Manchester, and they are still accepting submissions until 31 December if you happen to be of artistic skill. If you are not so lucky, it should still prove a fascinating exhibition, well worth a trip to Manchester if you're not based in the area.

If Manchester seems a bit far to go, then their website - while still relatively new - is already exhibiting some interesting content, and we look forward to seeing what other finds they will post next.

A Hallowe'en Treat: Surgeon's Hall Museum, Edinburgh

If you happen to be in the Edinburgh area this weekend, we recommend that you stop in to the Surgeon's Hall Museum to explore their fantastic collections and exhibits. It is their last open weekend this year, which is appropriate, since today and tomorrow are potentially the best possible days for exploring an exhibit about pathological anatomy, or the history of surgery, or Sherlock Holmes and his real-life counterpart, Charles Bell. They will still be open during the week, which means you are also welcome to visit on Hallowe'en itself. The museum is open from 12-4 Monday to Friday, and the weekend openings should start again in April.

The Surgeon's Hall Museum, Edinburgh

The Surgeon's Hall Museum also runs many special events and lectures in the stunning William Playfair building, so if you are local or planning a trip to the area, you might consider exploring their website to see whether they have anything exciting coming up (recent examples include the Pathology: A Day in Medical Detection event in October, while November and December feature tours on the history of medicine pre-anaesthesia and a talk on Scottish anatomists). You can also follow them on Twitter for updates and some fantastic links about the history of medicine.

If you aren't in Edinburgh, that doesn't mean you can't partake of the fun: come to the conference in June where we will be organising an opportunity to explore this amazing museum.

Have a deliciously monstrous Hallowe'en!

Fourth Plenary Speaker: Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

Earlier in the month we wrote a blog post about Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's fantastic new book, Staring: How We Look. We are therefore very honoured to be able to announce today that Prof. Garland-Thomson, Professor of Women's Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, will be attending the conference in June as the fourth plenary speaker, joining Prof. Margrit Shildrick, Dr. Peter Hutchings, and Prof. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Together, these four speakers bring with them research expertise in all areas that the conference hopes to explore.

Video is copyright Emory University, 2010

Prof. Garland-Thomson's work has explored the extraordinary body in different contexts and from a variety of perspectives, from historical and cultural conceptions of freakery to contemporary reactions to and constructions of disability. Her most recent work explores our conflicted engagement with the impulse to look, and she has also put together a short video briefly discussing some of these ideas. This year (2011-2012) she also stands as a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Once again, we as the conference organisers would like to thank everyone who has responded so positively to the event and given their support, whether it be as keynote speakers or future delegates (we have already received some fascinating abstracts)! We are both excited and honoured to be involved in this project, and we cannot say how much look forward to working with you all.

Encountering Unexpected Bodies

For a discussion on extraordinary bodies, freak shows, monsters and staring, check out Rosemarie Garland Thomson's concise and informative article 'Staring at the Other' which traces unusual embodiments from ancient times to present day. The article highlights the shifting terminology attached to these unexpected bodies (monsters, freaks, prodigies, disabled) dependent on socio-historical context as well as the nature of people's interest in them (manifested usually in the phenomenon of 'staring'), ranging from adoration, hostility, reverence and repulsion. Reflecting on freak shows and the changing meanings surrounding the anomalous form, Thomson writes:

Freaks were spectacular public displays of novelty that entertained viewers who gladly paid to stare. Droll and fascinating freak figures were created from the unusually embodied by way of exaggeration, irony, and theatrical staging. What we now consider the medical dermatological condition of vitiligo, for example, was parlayed into the act of Spotted Boys. Giants and Midgets appeared juxtaposed together to highlight their differences. Fat Ladies titillated with cute diminutive stage names such as Dolly Dimples. The ordinary microcephalic black man became the exotic Missing Link dressed up in an ape suit. Spears and loincloths transformed albino twins into Wild Men of Borneo. Amputees became Armless Wonders by cutting out paper dolls, penning calligraphy, and drinking tea with their toes. The freak show validated curiosity and authorized public staring at bodies that departed from the ordinary by embellishing differences to make money.

The article ends with an examination of contemporary discourses surrounding monstrous embodiment, contextualized with the advent of technology, progress of medicine and the 'potent medium of television spectacle' which aimed to place these bodies back into the spotlight.
Is the wondrous freak gone altogether in our society? How can a historical approach to extraordinary embodiment inform our modern sensibilities? Thomson tellingly concludes that the unexpected bodies have been 'edited out of the human community like textual errors in the path of automatic spell checkers.'
If you are interested in this scholar and her landmark works in the field of disability studies, visit her official page featuring many helpful links and videos!

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, "Giants"

Julius Koch, Le Geant Constantin
Image courtesy of TheTallestMan.com

As you can probably imagine, we are looking forward to the forthcoming Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters, ed. Jeffrey Weinstock, with great anticipation (it's hardly a stretch of the imagination to say that if you're reading this blog, you are too, and if you weren't before, you most definitely are now. Or at least you should be). To be totally honest, we simply cannot wait for it to be published.

Time travel was attempted (and subsequently abandoned), things were learned that cannot be unlearned, and our respective psyches were threatened with total destruction. As a result, we had no choice but to resign ourselves to the doleful realisation that, like mere mortals, we would have to wait.

But that wait has been made less torturous by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (who, just a small reminder, will be flying all the way from Washington D.C. to Edinburgh, Scotland to be a keynote at our conference along with Peter Hutchings and Margrit Shildrick). On the In the Middle blog, he was ever so kind last month to post a draft of his entry on giants, to which we now direct your attention:

The giant pervades every level of society, from popular culture and folklore to self-consciously artistic literature and scholarly discourse. With some notable exceptions, the giant is strongly gendered male. He often figures the masculine body out of control, demarcating a cultural boundary not to be traversed. The giant is foundational. The world may have been created from the body of a giant, as in Norse fable; or the body of the earth may spawn giants, as in classical tradition. He is so elemental that humanity cannot escape his abiding presence.

Keep an eye out for the encyclopaedia itself - definitely going to be a good book to have on the shelf. 

Cute & Creepy Exhibition in Florida

Sadly for us, all of the organisers of the Sensualising Deformity conference are based in Edinburgh, which means we cannot attend the absolutely fantastic and grotesque Cute and Creepy exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts at Florida State University in Tallahassee. But we can help encourage others to attend in our stead, and hope that they will bring back tales of their creepy experiences. The exhibit will be held between 14 October and 20 November of this year, so there's plenty of time yet to plan your trip; perhaps your family or friends might enjoy a trip to Disney World while you nip off for some monstrous pop surrealism?

The site's home page offers different examples of the work, or the kind of work, that will be offered at the exhibit, and based on that alone there is no question that it would be of interest to this conference and anyone reading the blog, but as if to ensure no further doubt, curator Carrie Ann Baade writes,

To see beauty in the carnivalesque or macabre, in freaks and in monsters, is a matter of aesthetics. Most of us can agree on the artistic value of a Monet or Titian but this work is for a daring audience, an audience open to exploring the strange beauty and the ecstasy inherent in our culture's aversions.

Travis Louis, The Curse of the Goat, 2006.

There is something that makes us uneasy when confronted by the weird or the unusual. Those who can appreciate both have come to anticipate and enjoy unexpected sensations. Work of this nature is not going to be an underground movement any longer: the grotesque is going mainstream.

The website also offers a tantalising excerpt of Nancy E. Hightower's essay "Revelatory Monsters: Deconstructive Hybrids, the Grotesque, and Pop Surrealism" that is included in the exhibition catalogue, which is worth quoting in full:

We need monsters in our lives.

We like to fear them, to run hiding under the covers or clenching a lover's arm until the monster is destroyed or banished to far off lands. they are wonderful like that, refusing to ever completely disappear from our lives, affording us the opportunity for self-introspection if we take a moment to recognize that monsters don’t die because they are essentially us(Cohen 5). Once they are eradicated from our cultural memory, we go, too. And that monstrous, wondrous body is at the heart of the grotesque. From the playful grotteschiunearthed in the Domus Aurea to demons of the illuminated manuscripts that overflowed from the margins onto the actual text, the monstrous body has always threatened what our culture has desired to contain (or perhaps more accurately, trapped, vetted, and fixed to incorporate whatever impossible standards it has set up to differentiate us from them). But the monstrous body is also prophetic in nature.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues that as a “construct and a projection, the monster exists only to be read: the monstrum is etymologically ‘that which reveals’ that which warns…like a letter on the page, the monster signifies something other than itself”. What sets up this kind of fulcrum is society itself: “The too-precise laws of nature as set forth by science are gleefully violated in the freakish compilation of the monster's body. A mixed category, the monster resists any classification built on hierarchy or a merely binary opposition, demanding instead a ‘system’ allowing polyphony, mixed response (difference in sameness, repulsion in attraction), and resistance to integration…”. These kinds of juxtapositions are what form the definition of the grotesque.

Greg Simpkins, Knightengale, 2008.

Of course, with such passages accompanying the examples of art included on the home page of the site, monsterphiles who, like us, don't live anywhere near the exhibition will be working out calculations in the vain hope that a trip to Florida this autumn might be within their budget (we feel your pain). But if you happen to be so lucky as to be in Florida, or close enough for a visit, we highly recommend visiting the exhibition.

If not, perhaps you will have to do as we are doing and wistfully pass on the information to any fortune-favoured friends you might have who could attend! In the meantime, console yourself, perhaps, with a closer look at the artists involved, whose work is engaging with monstrosity in such sensational ways.

The Sensualising Deformity Blog

One of the long-term goals of the Sensualising Deformity conference is to bring together scholars and students around the world and across disciplines who share an interest in deformity, monstrosity, or freakery, and to develop a network that connects them together.

This blog is a central part of that aim, offering links to all things related to the conference themes, be they articles, seminars, exhibitions, websites, films, or general miscellanea. We also hope to post calls for papers and contributions for other conferences or collections that are being organised in the field.

For those who may not, for whatever reason, be able to attend the conference in June, we hope the blog will ensure that you are still welcomed as part of a network of like-minded individuals, and that you will find here a source of knowledge and ideas as fascinating as the conference itself!