New Research Project on 'Enfreakment' in Popular Culture

In the course of the next three years, Katja Kanzler and her project team, Ella Ernst and Laura Pröger, will investigate processes of 'enfreakment' and their role in US-American popular culture. The project is interested in the cultural figure of the 'freak,' and the ways in which 'freaks' are always the product of particular performances, stagings, constructions. It is these performative processes that the projects wants to examine across a wide range of popular genres, in the present as well as the past. It wants to unpack how these processes have---or have not---changed over time and across genres, how popular culture has tied them to promises of pleasure, and how popular materials have worked with the disparaging implications of these stagings. For further details, please see the project description.