UC Riverside

My doctoral dissertation, “‘Freaking’ the Archive: Archiving Possibilities with the Victorian Freak Show,” proposes an archival research practice grounded in the nineteenth-century freak show’s peculiar conventions. Freak bodies are perplexing and material: hairy, leggy, squishy, rubbery, even electric. Freak bodies are also perplexing materials: forged autobiographies, grangerized travelogues, reported gossip. Through their taxonomizing imperatives, archives subdue these difficult bodies, but also risk stifling their lively histories. My “freak” archival research practice confronts this problem by generating new methods for accessing subjects underrepresented in the historical record through traditional research models. Anchored in case studies of Victorian freak performers and their contemporary performance art progeny, “‘Freaking’ the Archive” splits into three sections titled “The Archive,” “Archives,” and “Archiving,” which progress from broadly theoretical to increasingly practice based. I contend that freaks overhaul the normative orders of archival systems by breeding forms of documentation that simultaneously activate the freak show’s interlocking textual, visual, aural, and performed narratives, requiring us to push beyond our inherited visual-empirical research methods. Broadening the archive’s communicative capacities changes the goals of archival research. No longer concentrated on assembling stable bodies of knowledge, archival work becomes an experiment in provisionality committed to imagining more inclusive research practices.