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SIDESHOW U.S.A.: FREAKS AND THE AMERICAN CULTURAL IMAGINATION. By Rachel Adams. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001; pp. 289. $19.00 paper.
At a typical sideshow, barkers offered the "ten in one" that provided ten extraordinary attractions for the price of one ticket. Following this tradition, Rachel Adams offers an analogous way into the sideshow phenomenon. The reader is met with such disparate figures as "the wild man," Toni Morrison's ghostly incarnate "Beloved," and the eroticized and exoticized subjects captured through the photographic lens of Diane Arbus. Sideshow U.S.A. argues the importance of the "freak" in America's cultural imagination and material reality, and its author recognizes that "freak is not an inherent quality but an identity realized through gesture, costume, and staging" (6). By reclaiming "freak" as a performative identity vis-a-vis Judith Butler's seminal notion of iteration and repetition, Adams lifts the figure of the freak out of the ghettoized history of popular entertainment culture to invest it with social, aesthetic, and political implications.
Adams honors the sideshow history by first establishing its entertainment and social value in American culture. She employs the history of the sideshow to demonstrate the location of the freak's origins in popular culture as well as to provide an understanding of the performative dynamic between performer and spectator. Adams posits that the insights into structure, reception, and performance of the freak within the sideshow are most productively understood when "supplemented by information about what it meant to audiences and the performers themselves" (4). This attention to the relationship fostered between spectator and performer allows Adams to depart...