The Freak and ‘Disabled’ Multiculturality

Abstract

Differently from positive visions of multiculturality as the richness of American diversity, in this article I tackle multiculturalism as one of the elements of the category of the freak, where cultural, ethnic and racial difference coincided with disability and both concocted to fence off diversity in American society. I understand the freak as a critical multicultural field because of its recruitment processes, as evidenced by the case of the Italian Tocci brothers, but also as a place of confinement and exoticization of American citizens who, as a consequence of their disability, came to inhabit a transnational category used to police concepts of ‘normal’ American masculinity and femininity. In this reading, multiculturality is understood hence as a fabrication that veils processes of enfreakment.