Freak Show Legacies: How the Cute, Camp and Creepy Shaped Modern Popular Culture

Despite the decline of freak shows in the 1960s and 1980s,freakish elements have persisted and evolved in modern popular culture,including reality TV,horror movies,dark comedies,and tattoos. This book explores how freakish culture has conflicted with genteel culture and transformed American popular culture over the 20th century,using the phenomenon of "the freak" to understand its enduring popularity.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 248 pages
Publication date: 03 June 2021
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Society has always been captivated by the bizarre, startling, and unusual. Gary Cross, in this book, demonstrates how freakish elements have permeated modern popular culture throughout the 20th century, despite the apparent disillusionment with this once ubiquitous cultural outlet. He explores how the spectacle of freakishness conflicted with genteel culture, leading to the condemnation of freak shows by middle-class America, which in turn led to the transformation and merging of genteel and freak culture through the cute, camp, and creepy. While the carnival and circus freak were marginalized by the 1960s and largely disappeared by the 1980s, forms of freakish culture survived and continue to manifest today in reality TV, horror movies, dark comedies, and the popularity of tattoos.

Freak Show Legacies will shift its focus from the individual "freak" as "the other in society" to the audience for the freakish and the transformation of wonder, sensibility, and sensitivity that this phenomenon entailed. It will utilize the phenomenon of "the freak" to understand the transformation of American popular culture across the 20th century, identify elements of "the freak" in popular culture both past and present, and ask how it has persisted despite its apparent unpopularity.

Weight: 392g
Dimension: 157 x 233 x 17 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781350145122