Enfreakment: The Poetics and Politics of Freak Show Legacies in US Culture
Edited by Ella Ernst Edited by Katja Kanzler Edited by Leonie M. J. Kratzenstein Edited by Laura Michelle Pröger Edited by Annika Schadewaldt Edited by Stefan Schubert
Hardback (Forthcoming)
(October 2026)
ISBN: 9783825397678
5.31 x 8.27 inches
Price: $92.00
This volume examines “enfreakment” as the cultural logic through which certain bodies, characters, and traits are framed as “freakish” across US culture. Exploring the scripts that underwrite figurations of freakishness, the collection illuminates how freak-show logics persist across contemporary media and continue to shape the spectacularization of bodies, identities, and communities.
Bringing together contributions on film, reality TV, fanfiction, comics, novels, and other literary works and popular media, the collection approaches enfreakment as a performative and aesthetic process through which difference is staged, circulated, and consumed. In doing so, the volume highlights the enduring cultural power of the freak-show and its legacies and explores how they continue to inform negotiations of normalcy and belonging in US culture.
- Edited by Ella Ernst
- Edited by Katja Kanzler
- Edited by Leonie M. J. Kratzenstein
- Edited by Laura Michelle Pröger
- Edited by Annika Schadewaldt
- Edited by Stefan Schubert
Other Titles in this Series
Toward a New Metropolitanism
Reconstituting Public Culture, Urban Citizenship, and the Multicultural Imaginery in New York and Berlin
Volume 142
Renegotiating American Nationalism
The Proxy War over Marriage Equality through the Lens of Un-Americanism
Volume 317
Physicians of Culture
Healing Catharsis in the Fiction of Toni Morrison and the Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche
Volume 287
Crossroads in American Studies
Transnational and Biocultural Encounters. Essays in Honor of Rudiger Kunow
Volume 269
The Native American Declaration of Independence
William Apess's Reflections of Ethnic Consciousness
Volume 156
The Culture of Corporeality
Aesthetic Experience and the Embodiment of America, 1945-1960
Volume 151
Walking in the Wilderness
The Peripatetic Tradition in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Painting
Volume 134
Transnational Mediations
Negotiating Popular Culture between Europe and the United States
Volume 261
American Studies/Shifting Gears
A Publication of the DFG Research Network 'The Futures of (European) American Studies'
Volume 185
Migration – Miscegenation – Transculturation
Writing Multicultural America into the Twentieth Century
Volume 114
Temporality in American Filmic Autobiography
Cinema, Automediality and Grammatology with 'Film Portrait' and 'Joyce at 34'
Volume 187