From Freak Shows to Freaknature

Abstract

Within environmental discourses, more-than-human beings with corporeal differences are often represented and exhibited as unnatural, abnormal, monstrous, freakish, bizarre, and deformed—as freaknature—and ultimately used as evidence of the harms of human-caused environmental contamination. The article examines the construction of freaknature alongside histories of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century American freak show to consider how these contemporary portrayals of the more-than-human not only reinvigorate the ableist tropes that were central to the freak show, but also reinforce logics of gender essentialism, transphobia, white supremacy, Orientalism, and racial purity. Both freak shows and freaknature operate/d as a scientific apparatus constructing and exhibiting some human and more-than-human beings as unnatural while shoring up other corporeal formations as normal/natural. Together, these crip figures on display call into question the binaries at the foundation of Western science.