ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the history of the representation of the un-ideal body and relates these theories to relevant examples from Anglo-American popular culture. It explores how unusual bodies were first identified as ‘monsters’. The chapter analyses how the ‘monster’ became a ‘freak’ and finally consider the politics of the identification of disability. ‘Monsters’ disappeared in the nineteenth century lingering only as the characters of fiction. The thesis of enfreakment argues that the body may be different, strange, even unusual, but it is the mechanism of representation which renders this body a ‘freak’. Another factor in the creation of the identity of disabled was the development in medical science of a branch term biomedicine. The 1960s saw the birth of what Rosemarie Garland Thomson terms ‘identity studies’. Based upon the theory of social constructionism, academic scholarship saw the rise of gender studies, sexuality studies, and race and ethnicity studies and, most recently, disability studies.
