This dissertation considers the constructed figure of the “freak” (and the resonance of the chronotope of the freakshow) in American film and popular culture. While film history has generally disavowed its own connections with the freakshow, this project instead places it within the heart of both classical Hollywood cinema and celebrity.

Drawing on M.M. Bakhtin's theory of the grotesque body to make connections between disability studies and feminist film and genre theory, this dissertation argues that although “freak bodies” (hyperbolized representations of otherness that dialog with the freakshow) seem to reify dominant cultural scripts of the body, they instead destabilize these scripts. This study illustrates the ways in which these liminal spectacles of race, gender and disability have served as complicated icons of political resistance, especially for marginalized spectators. It further suggests that the destabilizing power of freak imagery has been most pronounced in historical moments of social and economic crisis.

Chapter I calls for greater critical dialog between disability studies, body genre theory and grotesque theory. The next three chapters then offer a diachronic examination of three films from the classic sound horror cycle, focusing on their initial release during the Great Depression and their resurgence in the cultural crises of the 1960s and 1970s: Chapter II argues for the destabilizing power of representations of disabled bodies in Tod Browning's Freaks (1932); Chapter III adds the layer of race to the discussion by examining the conflation of race and disability in King Kong (1933); and Chapter IV examines the mimetic chain between political resistance and monstrous sexuality in Frankenstein (1931). Chapter V then provides a case study that recasts Michael Jackson's startext—and the history of stardom—by examining Jackson's ambivalent dialog with the material history of the freakshow and the series of crises that have defined his unstable startext.