Monsters, Freaks, and an American Horror Story: Life and Embodiment at the Borders of Normative Intelligibility

The figure of the monster articulates a sociocultural regulatory taboo conditioning the life and bodily experiences of those social groups and populations that, unable to commensurate with widespread cultural conceptualizations and schemata, are invisible and unintelligible from normative standpoints. By approaching American Horror Story: Freak Show in terms of its narrative and the contextual mainstream consumption, this paper analyzes the violent means by which the monstrous taboo is policed, the role of neoliberalism in its current articulation, and the possibilities of resisting a transformation enabled by the monstrous figure and the bodies and experiences it codifies.