Active Differences: Disability and Identity beyond Postmodernism

Abstract

This article looks at the recent examples of the uses disabled performers have made of freaks. It examines the strategy of linking freaks and disabled political subjects through the discussion of three performances: Graeae and Fittings' production of Mike Kenny's play The Last Freakshow; and Mat Fraser's two performances, Sealboy: Freak and Thalidomide! A Musical.

The article argues that these three performances enable us to develop negotiations between identity (modelled as representational stasis) and endless alterity (modelled as perpetual flux). It is tempting to frame disabled performers as modern-day freaks, but that analysis doesn't work within the context of disability performance. There is a tension between political disability identity politics and the act of performing, especially when one claims a history that one never really had. Lyotard warns about strategies that incorporate the outside/other into the inside/same. Lacan offers a way to think about the perception and understanding of difference that can usefully be applied to the appropriation of freakshows. In these performances we experience significatory slippage in performance, and not just as disconnected theory. The performances that are discussed in this article are appropriations of ideas and images gleaned from the historical freakshow, with their particular constructions of performer/spectator relationships. Each of the three performances offers a contestation of meanings, a multiplicity of confusions surrounding the act of watching other bodies in a way that is legibly political.

This article suggests that the process of negotiating meaning between freakishness and disability in these performances could point towards a critical and analytical practice for the future, enabling us to explore instability and incoherence without the loss of political possibility.

Notes

In 1980, the World Health Organisation adopted the discursive separation of disability, impairment and handicap. The relationship between the social nature of disability and corporeal impairment still exercises the field of Anglo-American Disability studies.

Most significantly in scholarly discussion of the early-twentieth-century freakshow in: Rosemarie Garland Thomas, Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York: New York University Press, 1996).

Mairian Corker and Tom Shakespeare, ‘Mapping the Terrain’, in Disability/Postmodernity, ed. by Mairian Corker and Tom Shakespeare (London: Continuum, 2002), pp. 1–17 (p. 15).

Graeae Theatre Company is a UK-based touring theatre company of disabled people. It is artistically led by people with physical and sensory impairments. <http://www.graeae.org.uk>. Fittings Multimedia Arts is a Liverpool company that develops and creates multisensory mixed media artworks using integrated companies of disabled and non disabled people. <http://www.fittings.org.uk>.

Mat Fraser is a British performer, writer and musician who works in theatre, film and television. He is highly visible in UK disability culture and also has a significant mainstream presence.

Mat Fraser, quoted in Sarah Barrell, ‘Making a Spectacle of Himself’, Independent, 15 August 2001.

Mike Kenny, ‘Fittings: The Last Freakshow’, in Graeae Plays One, ed. by Jenny Sealey (London: Aura Metro Press, 2002), pp. 227–57 (p. 235).

Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. and ed. by Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1977), p. 158.

Ibid., p. 157.

Lacan, Écrits, p. 156.

Ibid., p. 158.

Ibid., p. 159.

Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), p. 25.

Ibid., p. 15.

Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Intolerable Ambiguity: Freaks as/at the Limit’, in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. by Rosemarie Garland Thomson (New York: New York University Press, 1996), pp. 55–66 (pp. 60–61).

Kenny, ‘Fittings’, p. 229.

The writing and development methods offer a very strong connection with the fusion of the individual performer with their own freak persona – the changes between the cast members in the 1999 and the 2005 versions prompted a significant rewriting of the script in the revival. I use the 1999 version here.

Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 26.

Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, p. 81.

Ibid., p. 27.

Sigmund Freud, ‘The Exceptions’, in The Penguin Freud 14: Art and Literature, 2nd edn, ed. by Angela Richards and Albert Dickson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), and Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes On The Management of a Spoiled Identity, 2nd edn (London: Pelican, 1990 [1963]).

It hardly needs saying that disability equality is, according to this model, focused on the minority world of post-industrial nations.

Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, p. 82.