The Consequences of Enfreakment

We may think of people in our everyday lives as “freaks” because of their dissimilarities from us.  I think of a child who is teased at school because the other children think they are weird; they may be called a “freak” and isolated on the playground.  But what happens when you never outgrow the enfreakment that has been placed on you?  What if as you grow older the isolation and extensive critiques only multiple?  That was the case for Millie and Christine McKoy.  

Millie and Christine McKoy were African American conjoined twins that were connected at the pelvis.  They were born into slavery in 1815 and sold in order to travel around and be exhibited in freak shows around the world.  In 1863 the girls were freed by the Emancipation Proclamation but continued to participant in freak shows under the management of their former owner.  Millie and Christine were labeled freaks specifically because of their body.  They learned to speak five different languages, dance, play music, and sing but still people’s curiosity wanders towards the body.  While Millie and Christine were participating in the freak shows, and even after they had finished, the girls suffered the debilitating consequences of enfreakment. 

Millie and Christine were repeatedly dehumanized by the process of the freak shows.  They were particularly disempowered by what Susan Stewart refers to as the triangle, composed of the audience, the object being viewed, and the mediator.  The mediator refers to the announcer or freak show pitchman that was usually present to introduce Mille and Christine.  The mediator for freak shows, who was usually a white able-bodied man, would form the lens in which the audience saw the performances.  Taking away any direct communication between the freak show participants and the audience further differentiated them and gave any power or agency the participants may have possessed directly to the mediator (Garland-Thomson 185).  Millie and Christine were dehumanized further by their “stage names”.  The girls were often referred to as "The Carolina Twins", "The Two-Headed Nightingale" and "The Eighth Wonder of the World".  In this advertisement you will see Millie and Christine sensationalized as a "Wonderful two Headed Girl".   The stage names serve to separate the freaks from actual human beings and invites audiences to indulge in the privilege of staring at the “freaks” without being stared at themselves.  Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, a disability studies scholar, describes the common man at the freak show as, “coming and going at will, this universal subject looks without being seen, judges without being judged, enjoys without being enjoyed, knows without being known” (Garland-Thomson 193).  Garland-Thomson is describing the absolute privilege of the audience to experience disembodiment as the performers are sentences to complete embodiment.

Ellen Samuels, author of Where Enslavement Meets Enfreakment, describes enfreakment as the process of using one’s body as an object of entertainment for others.  She argued that enfreakment was not a personal matter but rather ““Freak” is a way of thinking about and presenting people – a frame of mind and set of practices” (Samuels 56).  In the eighteenth century the freak show was created and supported by the curiosity of the public.  Unfortunately that meant that any body defined by “freakery” was subject to public scrutiny and observation.   The emergence of a scientific field referred to as “teratology”, meaning the study of monsters, put human oddities like Mille and Christine under the microscope.  The doctors hoped that by studying what made these “monsters”, like Mille and Christine, different they could better understand how normal bodied people worked (Gold).  Thus, Millie and Christine were examined and sometimes photographed even when they did not wish to be.  In the picture below Mille and Christine are standing holding a drapery around their nude bodies but revealing the place in which their bodies were fused. 

Ellen Samuels describes the unwanted photograph; “Displeasure is perhaps an understatement for the expression on the face of Millie, the twin pictured on the right.  Indeed, while her shyer sister stares downward, her face barely visible, Millie (by all accounts the feistier one of the two) is positively glaring at the camera-at us” (Samuels 71).  Samuels’s description of Millie’s reasonable reaction to being photographed against her wishes highlights the oppression Millie and Christine endured by losing their right to privacy.

Another major consequence of their enfreakment was the over-sexualization that Millie and Christine endured throughout their lifetime.  Although it is likely that Millie and Christine’s race and gender were also working against them, I would argue that their “extraordinary body” also played a major role in sexualizing them to the public.  Millie and Christine were often asked about their genitalia despite their beautiful singing voices and knowledge of five different languages; people were still most perplexed by the ambiguity surrounding their genitalia.  Millie and Christine’s “odd” body was put on display and made vulnerable to these possible embarrassing inquiries about their sexuality and possible sex life.  Their enfreakment gave the public reason to photograph them in the nude, eroticize as well as fetishize them.

Millie and Christine McKoy serve as a perfect example of the destructive consequences of enfreakment.  Although Millie and Christine did not choose to become “freaks” their former owner and the curiosity of the public thrust it upon them and they had to endure the consequences.  Millie and Christine were repeatedly dehumanized while participating in freak shows around the world.  Their agency and voice was taken away from them by the mediator or circus ringmaster narrating their experiences as well as assigning them degrading stage names such as “The two-headed girl”.  Additionally Millie and Christine enjoyed nearly no privacy due to their extraordinary body and were often the subject of intense public curiosity.  Similarly, the McKoys were granted no discretion even with their most personal matters as they were photographed naked, and over-sexualized by the public.

Works Cited

Gold, Sarah E. "The Berkeley Undergraduate Journal." Millie-Christine McKoy and the American Freak Show: Race, Gender, and Freedom in the Postbellum Era, 1851. N.p., n.d. Web. 08 Apr. 2014. <http://escholarship.org/uc/item/39g057p3#page-1>.

Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. "The Beauty and The Freak." Points of Contact: Disability, Art, and Culture. By Susan Crutchfield and Marcy Epstein. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2000. N. pag. Print.

Samuels, Ellen. "Examining Millie and Christine McKoy: Where Enslavement and Enfreakment Meet." JSTOR. University of Chicago PressChicago, IL, 26 Aug. 2011. Web. 08 Apr. 2014. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/660176>.