The conference will examine the underlying dynamics of constructing somebody as a “freak” in depictions of non-normativity, deviance, or extraordinariness—the highly complex, dynamic, and contradictory processes that have been described as “enfreakment.” It is partly funded through the DFG project “Enfreakment as an Invective Mode in US-American Popular Culture.”

Venue: Albertina Lecture Hall (Beethovenstraße 6)

Organizers: Katja Kanzler, Ella Ernst, Laura Pröger, Anna Gaidash, Annika Schadewaldt, Stefan Schubert

 

Conference Program

Thursday, May 22, 2025

9:30-9:50am

• Conference Opening

9:50-10:40am 

• Ulla Kriebernegg (Graz): “A Sideshow of Frailty: Enfreakment, Aging, and Disability in North American Care Home Narratives”

10:40-11am: Break 

11am-1pm

• Ella Ernst (Leipzig): “Blood, Guts, and Gore in Invincible (2021) — Enfreakment and Genre Subversion in Superhero Animation”
• Małgorzata Olsza (Poznań): “The Enfreakment of the Reproductive Body in Beth Hetland’s Tender (2024)”
• Alena Cicholewski & Krutika Patri (Bremen): “’Primitive, Drug-Loving Freaks’ — Enfreakment and Anti-Colonial Resistance in R. F. Kuang’s The Poppy War Trilogy (2018-2020)”

1-2pm: Lunch

2-2:50pm 

• Jessica Williams (SUNY Old Westbury / via Zoom): “Decoding Enfreakment: The Intersection of Disability and Morality in Visual Media Portrayals of the Freak Show”

2:50-3:10pm: Break

3:10-5:10pm

• Laura Pröger (Leipzig): “Staging Survival, Performing the American Dream: Enfreakment, Melodrama, and the Affective Spectacle of Class in Hillbilly Elegy”
• Milo Miller (Leipzig): “Deviance and Modes of Self-Enfreakment in Reader Self-Insert Creepypasta Fanfiction”
• Stefan Schubert (Leipzig): “Monster, Alien, Animal? Spectacular Bodies and ‘Freakish’ Cinematography in Jordan Peele’s Nope (2022)”

6pm: Dinner (Self-Pay)

 

Friday, May 23, 2025

9:30-10:20am 

• Heike Steinhoff (Bochum): “(Dis-)Enfreakment and the Body Politics of Popular Feminisms”

10:20-10:40am: Break

10:40am-12:40pm

• Anna Gaidash (Kyiv/Leipzig): “Emotional Abuse in Beth Henley’s Drama: The Secret Self of Control Freaks”
• Natalia Vysotska (Kyiv): “‘She Is Almost a Freak’: De/Resacralizing the Big Female Body in Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten”
• Elisa Heuser (Tübingen): “Mollie Fancher and Josephine Marie Bedard — The Enfreakment of (Show)Fasting Women in North America in the Late 19th Century”

12:40-1:40pm: Lunch (Catered)

1:40-3:40pm

• Katja Kanzler (Leipzig): “Enfreakable Bodies and the Global Dynamics of the 19th Century Freak Show”
• Gabriele Pisarz-Ramirez (Leipzig): “’Fresh From the Bush Country’: Antillean Women in US Popular Writings on the Panama Canal Zone”
• Annika Schadewaldt (Leipzig): “The Scales of Enfreakment in Eudora Welty’s Short Fiction”

3:40-4pm: Break

4-4:50pm 

• Evangelia Kindinger (Berlin): “‘She Was Large Beyond Any Woman Most Had Ever Seen’: Mountain Womanhood and Appalachian Otherness in US Literature”

-5pm: Farewell