Techniques of Sustaining the Bourgeois Corporeality and the Popular Exhibitions of "Hairy Wonders" in the early 20th Century Prague
Abstract
The emergence of mass consumer culture in the urban environments of the late 19th-century Europe brought about a number of new techniques for keeping one's body in line with the socially defined norms. At exactly the same time, sometimes even right next to the newspaper ads on various "beauty products", advertisement lured citizens to visit exhibitions of live "human-curiosities", "half-man-half-animal", "freaks" brought from "exotic" territories outside Europe.
In the proposed presentation, the concept of "extraordinary body", first coined by R.-G. Thomson will be used to theorize the making of the burgeois body in the context of the early 20th-century Czech lands and the city of Prague in particular.
Beginning with two particular encounters of Prague's audiences with the so called "Hairy Wonders" - firstly with Krao Farini, the famous "Ape-woman" or the so called Darwinian "missing-link" in 1902 and secondly with "the Lion-man" Joseph Bibrowski in 1912 - the aim of the presentation will be to capture the construction of bourgeois corporeality. The bourgeois body will be conceptualized as designated on the intersection of distinct axes of difference (gender, class, race, ethnicity) and as sustained on the everyday basis by particular techniques of caring of one's own body.
With the image of "savage-like freaks" on mind, the practices of shaving, trimming or helping/avoiding the hair grow on the right/wrong spots of the body will be analyzed as important techniques of self-disciplination, enabling the persistence of social- and gender distinctions. The "pure" and "beautiful" bourgeois body will be finally framed in the early Czech eugenics, namely in its interconnectedness with the national politics and the phantasies of collective body of the nation, produced during the so called "national revival" period.