Supplemental Post #5 - Erin Cooney

In another one of my classes, we just talked about freak shows today and my teacher made some interesting connections between freak shows and celebrity. We were discussing basically how we consider issues of consent with regard to areas such as freak shows, because in those realms, people were getting paid, having a job, sometimes even becoming famous as a result of their participation in that industry. In some ways, that sounds empowering and positive, but then in other ways, it's challenging, because the people participating in freak shows may not have any other (or hardly any other) options for employment, because of a variety of factors that position them as non-normative, often relating to race or gender or ability or class, etc. That brings up the question of how we interpret their participation/position in freak shows as empowering versus exploitative. We then related this to celebrities, especially modern-day celebrities, which I think fits in well with conversations of what is exploitative or empowering in context of the readings we've been doing around Carmen Miranda and Jennifer Lopez and issues of what it means to be (or to try to be) in control of one's own image etc. Can someone actually be in true control of their image and make their participation in an exploitative system empowering through that control? Is the lack of other options and possibilities so limiting as to undercut all the potential for empowerment here? Probably it's a mix of all of these, but it's hard to say, and these are really persistent questions that keep coming up again and again across a variety of situations, times, contexts, etc.