From Freak Shows to FreakNature: A Crip Critique of the Un/natural

• In Event: Sheraton Roundtable Session Five
  In Roundtable Session: Conceptual and Imaginative Expansions for Environmental Justice (Table 7)

Abstract

Within environmental discourses, more-than-human beings with corporeal differences are often represented and exhibited as abnormal, monstrous, freakish, bizarre, and deformed – as “freaknature” – and used as evidence of the harms of human-caused environmental contamination. This paper examines the construction of freaknature alongside histories of the 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 transphobia and intersexphobia, white supremacy, Orientalism, and racial purity. Both freak shows and freaknature operate/d as a scientific apparatus constituting and exhibiting some human and more-than-human beings as unnatural while shoring up other corporeal formations as normal/natural, and has implications for environmental education curriculum and approaches.

Author

• Jenne Schmidt, Colorado State University
  Presenting Author