Abstrakt
Drawing from contemporary disability history discourse, the presentation interrogates three different historical examples of exhibiting so called „siamese twins“ in the Euro-american freakshow tradition at the end of the 19th century. The purpose is to discuss the international dimension of freakshow discourse, as well as it's local specifities, with focus on previously unquestioned region of middle- and east- Europe.
The presentations aims particulary on the less-known case of the so called „conjoined twins“ Rosa and Josefa Blazek (1877-1922). Throughout the presentation, this case will be compared with two of their better-known contemporaries, the Italian brothers Giacomo and Giovanni Battista Tocci (1875-1940), who also became fathers at the end of their lives, and the extremely popular Afro-american couple Millie and Christine McCoy (1851-1912) who were exhibited as the „Two-headed Nightingale“ both in the US and Europe.
The comparsion aims at different ways the „other“ body was produced through elaborated staging and different forms of representation (texts, photos, images). By introducing three different cases of presumably the same „type“ of bodily „otherness“ from three different regions, my intention is to show intertextual connections of Euro-american freakshow culture as well as the specificities of it's local forms, particulary in the region of former Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Finally, the analysis will be directed to the question how the discourses of race, nationality and class-specific feminity / masculinity inter-mingled to produce three common, yet at the same time different cases of the „other“ body.