How like a chimera, how like the stitched-together animals of Victorian science, how like Frankenstein’s monster—that is to say, how like a freak—is an anthology. Such is the effect of editors Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s, Michael Mark Chemers’s, and Analola Santana’s Freak Inheritance: Eugenics and Extraordinary Bodies in Performance, which proves to be another landmark effort in not only freak studies but disability studies and performance studies alike. Here Garland-Thomson et al. offer a sometimes jagged, sometimes harmonious assemblage of nineteen essays ranging from focused studies of individuals marked as freaks to analyses of performances and other entertainments to reflections on the usage of freaks and freak studies in the classroom. A range of scholars, then, will find this emergent hybrid creature of diverse scholarly interventions to be a thoughtful and probative interlocutor.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s Foreword and the editors’ Introduction stake and delimit the niche this volume seeks to fill. In the scholarly tradition, the editors position Freak Inheritance as the successor to—the inheritor of—a range of scholarship on the freak, but especially Robert Bogdan’s pathbreaking Freak Show (1988) and more directly Garland-Thomson’s own edited anthology Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (1996). The key overarching intervention the editors intend the essays to make has to do with a tension at the heart of the freak as cultural concept.“The paradox of the freak show,” they write, “is that while medical science emphasizes a belief in the inferiority of certain kinds of people, the freak show elevates those same people to a level of celebrity that both degrades and idolizes their difference.” That core paradox animates the rest of the collection, which the editors split into five sections.

Part I, “Staging,” presents a cluster of essays concerned with performance—the show in freak show. These essays adopt, generally speaking, one of two approaches. Some essays consider very specific instances of freak performance—as Josefinia Alcázar does in her close reading of abjection in the works of two performance artists of Mexican origin, La Congelada de Uva and Guillermo Gómez Peña, or as Michael Mark Chemers does in his focused analysis of the life and public persona of the American drummer Chick Webb. The others consider a suite of performances bound together by genre—as Ryan Donovan and Stacy Wolf do in their reading of disability in Anglophone musical theater, as Nadja Durbach does in her examination of pleasure as a central affect to freak performances, or as Susan Kattwinkel does in her consideration of the public display of incubators for premature infants as a kind of freak show. The latter category of essays proves especially effective and engaging insofar as they do double duty, offering thoughtful scholarly insight while nonetheless remaining informative and accessible to the reader outside their respective areas of academic specialty.

Part II, “Hybridity,” echoes the opening gambit of this review in considering the ways in which the figure of the freak has served as a borderland between states of being. The essays in this section almost uniformly take as their tack the approach of keyhole history: using the lives of specific individuals marked as freaks to peer into a broader thematic idea—ranging from Roger Barta’s detailed account of the life of Julia Pastrana, a Mexican performer with extreme body hair growth to Susan Antebi’s examination of the Mexican faith healer El Niño Fidencio. However, the middle two essays—Lillian E. Craton’s “Chin Up: Befriending the Bearded Ladies” and David A. Gerber’s “Rest in Peace, Charles Byrne?”—stand out. Craton offers a moving reading of freak show performers with hirsutism through her own reckoning with body hair growth. Gerber’s essay is one of the strongest in the collection because it not only meditates on the life and afterlife desecration of Charles Byrne, an Irishman in the late eighteenth century with gigantism, but also explicitly opens a window into the ongoing scholarly dispute between himself—a proponent of neo-Marxist, materialist understandings of what makes a freak—and the prevailing reading of the freak as a discursive category. This open window allows a newcomer to the field to understand the background conversation as much as the specific ideas under discussion in the essay itself.

Part III turns from chimerical considerations to a focus on “Monstrosity” with three essays. Here again Chemers considers a life up close, this time the life of American actor Harvey Leach, known for his extraordinary body, who late in life adopted the character of a monster on display. However, Chemers’s essay is preceded by two chapters with broader thematic focus: one by Devan Stahl tracing the history of Christian theological conceptions of conjoined births as monstrosities and one by Danielle Bainbridge reading two cases wherein people of African descent with albinism have been described as alien beings. Stahl’s essay proves especially strong, forcefully concluding with a call for what he calls “a theology of monstrosity” that fuses Christian theology with critical disability studies.

The collection then turns to several sites of trouble with depictions of freakery in Part IV, “Unsettling.” This part has the widest scope, ranging from an examination of Eudora Welty’s freak show photography by Keri Watson to a reading of fatness as freakery by Joyce L. Huff to the life and afterlife of Afong Moy, a disabled Chinese woman displayed as a freak in the US as read by Jenna Gerdsen. Most surprising and insightful, however, are the section’s first two chapters. The first, by Catherine Peckinpaugh Vrtis, reads several reality TV shows concerned with birth—such as 17 Kids and Counting (2008-2009) and Teen Mom (2009-2021)—as participating in a eugenic and white Christian nationalist discourse and imbuing promiscuity with a freakish essence. The second, by Robert Bogdan, explores the life of the Princess Alexandrine, a member of the Prussian royal family with Down syndrome that nonetheless was integrated openly into the royal family even as Adolf Hitler rose to power. These two essays exemplify the collection’s strong suit—locating freakery where least expected.

The collection ends in Part V, “Learning,” with a pair of essays that turn to mobilizing freak studies scholarship for pedagogical ends. Cynthia Wu, in “The Pedagogical Utility of Early Freak Shows,” twins her own entrée into disability studies by way of P. T. Barnum’s 1871 autobiography with a practical account of how she uses the foundational texts of freak studies in the classroom. The collection’s final essay, Leonard Cassuto’s “Teaching the Extraordinary Body,” is a fitting end that does unspoken double duty as the book’s conclusion, considering the ways in which the core concerns of freaks and freakery—particularly the freak as an ambivalent figure—remain evergreen for students.

This review has resisted defining freak and Cassuto’s final gesture at “The powerful back-and-forth between conflicted oppositions  [ . . . ] that powers the cultural work of freaks” suggests why. Throughout Freak Inheritance, its myriad scholars all point at a diverse and contested space where a definition should be. Indeed, as Gerber himself writes, disability studies scholars do not agree on the precise nature of the freak. It would be too tidy to retreat to defining freaks and freakery by this mess and this contestation. It would be too much sleight of hand. But for all the people marked as freaks this collection discusses, it is display and performance—whether voluntary or violent—that formed the boundaries of freakery. And what is sleight of hand if not a magic trick, a performance, an invitation to step right up and behold?