They Only Come Out at Night: Contemporary Sideshows and Grotesque Bodies of Change

• In Event: Scholar to Scholar I

Abstract

Contemporary sideshow performers use their bodies as canvases or texts to write and rewrite meaning. I explore contemporary sideshows for their potential to upend a legacy of exploited difference. Working through psychoanalytic concepts, I explore how grotesque bodies tempt and terrify through unconscious formations encountered through performance. In analyzing sideshow revivals, we understand how these events resist conventional strategies of display and performance, creating new meaning in the grotesque body and the spectator gaze.

Author

• Carly Gieseler, University of South Florida