MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Katherine Dunne’s Geek Love features a world of the Binewski Fabulon: a traveling circus side show starring the owners’ children—strategically engineered “freaks” with extraordinary bodies—where extraordinary bodies are the norm and “normies” are seen as of lesser value. In this world, the concept of the monster becomes challenged, as does the concept of the able body and mind. Children who are seen as too normal are threatened to be cast out of the Fabulon; “Normies” are murderous threats; one child, Arty, begins a death cult that preys on “normies”; and the youngest child, Chick, looks like a “normie” but has dangerous telekinetic powers. In all of these aspects, Geek Love presents the many angles that monstrosity can take, and the lack of cut-and-dry distinction that such a concept proposes.

Through the context of Katherine Dunne’s Geek Love, I will put monster studies (including work by Jefferey Jerome Cohen, Jack Halberstam, Margarit Schildrick and Bernadette Calafell) and disability studies (including Rosemary Garland Thomson, Lennard J. Davis, and Leslie Fiedler) in conversation with one another, focusing on the relationship between monstrosity and visibility, particularly with regard to the representation of the disabled body and mind in American culture. I will explore the ways in which monstrosity and disability are exhibited in Dunne’s work, through examination of major characters and popular culture—particularly with regard to monsters and the “freak show”— as represented in the text. In particular, I will focus on character Chick Binewski, the child who looks like a “normie” but has supernatural powers, causing him to serve as a representative of cognitive disability in the context of this world. Chick’s lack of visible difference, yet dangerous internal difference, brings about the challenge of cognitive disability in disability studies (referred to by Davis as “the specter haunting the normality of our time.”)