Geek Love Research Articles

Teaching Models of Disability with Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love

Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love , a novel about children with engineered disabilities living and performing in a traveling freak show, has proved a useful vehicle in teaching of disability studies in the college classroom in that it utilizes and complicates the negative depictions of disability often available to students, and even works to advance an opposing and more positive view of disability. From the vast field of disability studies, the article focuses on five paradigms or models of disability to ground and focus students’ learning: the morality model, the charity model, the medical model, the supercrip model, and the social group model. All highlight the problematic ways in which society often views disability, as well as how readers might begin to shift these perceptions in more positive ways.

How to Invest the "Body": Contested "Bodies" in Katherine Dunn's "Geek Love"

In Geek Love "bodies" face various operations via bio-political/power, which controls, circulates "bodies" within a position of disempowering them. "Bodies" are "allocated" to be created, "made", mutated or even disfigured by different "body" claimers "'makers" who have their own unreasonable reasons behind such a cruel conduct. Therefore, in Geek Love; "bodies" have turned into, objects, commodities, pieces of vital organs, and pieces of Art work to be sources of attraction. All of these are the outcomes of a greater power than them which have been imposed upon them "Bio-political/power".

From the Elephant Man to Barbie Girl: Dissecting the Freak from the Margins to the Mainstream

From the Elephant Man to Barbie Girl: Dissecting the Freak from the Margins to the Mainstream

Peace, Isolation, Purity. Salvation and its Antithesis in Katherine Dunn's Geek Love

This paper investigates how salvage and its antithesis are linked to the promise of salvation in Katherine Dunn's novel Geek Love by looking at the dynamics of social interaction forming normative as well as non-normative identities in the sideshow setting of the novel. The consent to give up and eradicate the Self when faced with internal dilemma and the promise of salvation, as it is depicted in Geek Love, rewrites Freudian and Jungian notions of group psychology, theology, and cult experiences. The processes which lead to the freak being treated as the ‘holy grotesque’ and the ‘Secret Self’ are analysed to show how the character Arty's motto ‘Peace, Isolation, Purity’ promises a kind of salvation from the Self and the burden of normalcy, which nonetheless ultimately leads to non-salvation.

Ambiguous Bodies: The Self/Body Paradigm as Challenged in Geek Love’s Conjoined Twins and Flannery O’Connor’s Intersexed ‘Freak’ in “A Temple of the Holy Ghost”

In this paper, I will discuss how this use of disability by both Dunn and O’Connor helps them to expose perceptions of “normal” corporeality. I will compare Dunn’s conjoined twins to O’Connor’s sexually ambiguous character in “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” for just as the twins are “peculiarly connected and unexpectedly separate” (Dunn, p. 51), the intersexed “freak” (a derogatory term I will explore) challenges existing body schemas in terms of finite gender categories. Both the twins and the “freak” embody corporeal states that illuminate the limits of the modern (and particularly the “individualized” American) mind in grappling with issues of independence, identity, agency, and what it means to be a “whole” person.

What’s Best for Them: Teaching Disability Studies to Science Majors

What’s Best for ThemTeaching Disability Studies to Science Majors Anna Mae Duane (bio) In one of Seinfeld’s more controversial episodes, Jerry tells his friends that he finds Asian women particularly attractive. When someone else points out that fetishizing Asian women could be considered racist, Jerry is aghast. “If I like their race,” he demands, “how can that be racist?” Many of the students who walk into my class on disability in American literature and culture could relate to Jerry’s astonishment. Overwhelmingly, they sign up for that class because they like people with disabilities. Although the class is offered through the English department, the majority of students who enroll are science majors. Many are pre-med, often specializing in molecular biology and genetic science. Other students are majoring in fields like special education and physical therapy. They are all deeply steeped in the medical model of disability, and the attendant narrative of heroic doctors who rescue, cure, and otherwise fix their patients. They are deeply invested in being the good guys in the battle between sickness and health. A central task of my class on disability studies is to expose and interrogate the paternalism that often permeates the medical model. It is tempting—but I would argue, dangerous—to create a syllabus that simply swaps the doctor out of a heroic role into a villainous one. Much disability theory was created in explicit opposition to the assumptions that science and medicine have produced as truths about how bodies should work. One constructed “truth” that has proven particularly devastating is the assumption that medical professionals are the most valid authority on what’s best for the patient. As Nancy Mairs writes, this paternalism further diminishes the experience and agency of people with disabilities, rendering them still more marginalized. “To some extent,” Mairs argues, “paternalism infects [medical professionals’] relations with all their patients—a word that doesn’t share its root with “passive” by accident—because [physicians’] apparent (and often real) power over life and death reduces us all to a childlike dependency on their superior knowledge. We reinforce their dominance through our docility” (161). But for my students, the role of parent-doctor is an enticing one indeed, one that allows them to ease suffering, rescue the lost, and cure the sick. As young adults eager to escape their own childhood dependence, medical expertise offers tantalizing authority. My goal is not to shame them for their rescue fantasies, but rather to prompt them to ask how they might disentangle the desire to help from the need to control the unwieldiness of difference and suffering. [End Page 175] In these classes, I include texts that directly address the damage the medical model can do, such as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s deft analysis of the overlap in the medical specimen and the freak show carte de visite, or Lucy Grealy’s heartrending experiences as the patient of a supremely arrogant and un-empathetic oncologist. But I’ve found that one of the most effective ways to think productively about the paternalistic underpinnings of the medical model is through an even more naturalized dialog between paternalism and infantilization: the relationship between parent and child. I’ve created a cluster of texts and films that place questions of medical authority—and the normality it enforces— in a familial framework. I begin the conversation with Josh Arson’s documentary Sound and Fury, followed by Katherine Dunn’s 1989 novel Geek Love, and finishing with works by disability theorists (and parents of children with disabilities) Michael Bérubé and Rachel Adams. The Oscar-nominated Sound and Fury deals with the choices two different families make about whether or not to arrange for cochlear implants for their deaf infants. In the film, two brothers, one deaf, one hearing, both have deaf children. The hearing couple (who nonetheless have deep familiarity/family ties with deaf culture) decide to have their infant implanted before age one. But the major tension of the film stems from the desire of a deaf five-year-old girl who importunes her deaf parents for a cochlear implant. Shockingly, for my students, the parents ultimately refuse her request and do not opt...

Katherine Dunn's Geek Love and the Vicissitudes of Class

Although critics often overlook its intimations of social class, Katherine Dunn's Geek Love is a working-class novel and, in some ways, an allegory of American class conflict that culminates in Oly Binewski's struggle with Miss Lick. American class experience is reflected in the price the Binewski family pays for class mobility, including bodily mutilation, resentment, and hysteresis, a form of class dysphoria attending class mobility.

Różnica jako podobieństwo. Dawanie świadectwa w powieści „Geek Love” Katherine Dunn

Katherinne Dunn’s 1989 novel Geek Love tells the story of a “nuclear” family (composed of parents and their children,) who used to operate a travelling circus. It is narrated by the founder’s daughter, who reminisces about her happy childhood as she looks after her senile mother and a daughter who remains unaware of the family’s past. A reading of the novel proposed herein puts forth that the category difference paradoxically becomes the basis for a sense of commonality: although the differences between people may be irreducible, people can give testimony to those differences.

Aggressive fictions: reading the contemporary American novel

Introduction: The Author-Reader ContractChapter 1. Narrative Speed in Contemporary Fiction The Terrible Twos, The Terrible Threes, John's Wife, Bombardiers, Oreo, Microserfs, Negrophobia, The Ticket That Exploded, My Cousin, My GastroenterologistChapter 2. Modalities of Complaint Portnoy's Complaint, Don Quixote, Pussy, King of the Pirates, Mercy, The Color Purple, Donald Duk, Doctor Rat, My Year of MeatsChapter 3. Conjugations of the Grotesque Geek Love, Invisible Monsters, The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, Towing Jehovah, Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles, Blood Meridian, and several speculative fictionsChapter 4. Violence Dark Property, The Road, American Psycho, Hogg, Frisk, Try, Blood and Guts in High School Chapter 5. Attacking the Reader's Ontological Assumptions Lying Awake, Fight Club, Ubik, House of Leaves, Against the DayConclusion: Why Read Aggressive Fictions?Notes Bibliography Index

The Angel and the Freak: The Value of Childhood and Disability in Katherine Dunn's Geek Love

The Angel and the Freak: The Value of Childhood and Disability in Katherine Dunn's Geek Love

The Texts of Tech: Technology and Authorial Control in Geek Love and Galatea 2.2

The Texts of Tech: Technology and Authorial Control in Geek Love and Galatea 2.2

Cult Fiction: “Good” and “Bad” Communities in the Contemporary American Novel

This article examines the way in which three contemporary novelists have interpreted the proliferation of cults and other independent communities in the USA. Thomas Pynchon's Vineland is read as a critique of individualism that regrets the loss of collective identity and purpose. A subsequent reading of Katherine Dunn's Geek Love demonstrates the destructive consequences of individual submission that draws parallels between the dynamics of “cult” communities and mainstream society. This is developed further in a discussion of Don DeLillo's Mao II, which is represented as an attempt to reconcile libertarian and communitarian discourses, while remaining mindful of the dangers of both.

La déraison des corps : Katherine Dunn et le monstrueux

A fascination for monstrosity and for the experience of alienation plays a central part in Katherine Dunn’s poetics, as this article attempts to show, paying particular attention to the representation of bodies and the violence they are submitted to in Attic and Geek Love.

Politics: Butler's Corporeal Politics: Matters of Politicized Abjection

This essay examines the work of Judith Butler in relation to corporeality through an analysis of Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” and Butler's notion of politicized abjection. Abjection is considered in relation to bodily materiality and proposed as the most promising path for a revamped corporeal politics. Through a reading of two novels, Katherine Dunn's Geek Love and Barbara Gowdy's Mister Sandman, the essay examines how the abject body can function as politically subversive. Throughout, the essay analyses Butler's placing of the material body in a political domain, and argues that she ultimately endorses materiality as potentially disruptive to the symbolic domain of viable bodies. This recasting of matter within her theory is shown as redefining the body as an active agent rather than a passive receptacle for regulatory norms. The essay examines this under-theorized aspect of her work, and illustrates that politicized abjection is as crucial to her philosophy as the notion of gender as performative.

Normalizing Freakery: Katherine Dunn's Geek Love and the Female Grotesque

On the surface, Katherine Dunn's novel Geek Love explores how a family of freaks who are the grotesque attractions in their own carnival accept themselves and use their status as freaks to leverage themselves to a position of power within the dominant normative society that marginalizes them. Carnival seems to function as Bakhtin says it does. Yet under closer examination, the carnival setting does not break down hierarchies and liberate the society “from the prevailing view of the world, from convention and established truths” (Bakhtin 34). Mary Russo has noted that Bakhtin's concept has limits: “an examination of the materials on carnival can also recall limitations, defeats, and indifferences generated by carnival's complicitous place in dominant culture.