Abstract
This chapter looks at culturally constructed freakishness in the representations of the freak body in popular music’s visual culture. Taking the music videos and live performances of Marilyn Manson and Lady Gaga it argues that physical ability, sexuality, and gender identities help shape cultural constructions of freakishness and therefore cannot be separated from freakish bodies. The chapter’s examinations reveal the hierarchy that exists within categories of freakishness and how, as the made freak body comes into contact with the born freak body, it is revealed as being inauthentic. Ultimately, however, this inauthenticity does not matter in the pop culture sphere because when the freak is disseminated through changing media, the separation between normal and freakish bodies, and therefore the distance between freak show and everyday life, collapses—the freak show is dispersed.
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Notes
- 1.
I am referencing Judith Butler’s notion of gender as a performative identity from her Bodies that Matter.
- 2.
Of course this raises the questions, What is a true freak or a real freak? Novelty acts are certainly not true freaks, but heavily modified bodies and Arty’s followers are buying into a realer freakishness because they are making significant and permanent changes to their bodies.
- 3.
Freak performer Erik Sprague, “The Lizardman ,” a Coney Island regular, is also famous through his association with Ripley’s Believe it or Not!
- 4.
Such as “The Vault: The Complete Marilyn Manson Archives” at www.nachtkabarett.com.
- 5.
As of March 2014, Gaga was the most followed person on Twitter with over 41 million followers.
- 6.
Camille Paglia even tells us that Gaga “attended the same upscale Manhattan private school as Paris and Nicky Hilton” (Paglia ).
- 7.
Ironically, the night Gaga premiered Jo Calderone, the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards, was the same night she won the award for best female video.
- 8.
In “Dance in the Dark” (Lady Gaga 2009) she similarly says that she is a “free bitch,” an oxymoronic description that implies freedom despite her position as female.
- 9.
For full lyrics see: http://ladygaga.wikia.com/wiki/Manifesto_of_Mother_Monster.
- 10.
“I had girls in wheelchairs crying to me at meet-and-greets, telling me that when they saw [the “Bad Romance”] video it changed their lives” (Robinson).
- 11.
It is unknown whether she was actually disabled, though most critics seem to think she isn’t.
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Williams, J.L. (2017). Born This Way? Pop Culture’s Collision with the Freak of Nature. In: Media, Performative Identity, and the New American Freak Show. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66462-0_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66462-0_6
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