Conference Presentations

Recent discourses on the ownership and repatriation of culturally significant museum artifacts have highlighted the potential for museum collections to reify structures of class, race, and ability. The curation of museum exhibits toward a determined ideological narrative may be viewed in light of the freak show, where freaks performed as mythologized characters to affirm or contest narratives of the normal body. Especially in cases where museums collect, retain, and display human remains, the museum institution risks reenacting the performance dynamics of the freak show, without a performer who is capable of offering consent. 

This paper will explore the dynamics of consent-to-display in the case of Chang and Eng Bunker, “The Siamese Twins.” In life, Chang and Eng used the alterity and enchantment associated with the freak show to subvert prejudices related to race and disability; in death, their bodies were subjected to a high-profile autopsy against the wishes of their families, justified by the idea that the bodies of so-called “monsters” are owed to Science. Their full-body death cast and preserved conjoined liver remain on display at the Mütter Museum, run by the Philadelphia College of Physicians where the autopsy was performed. 

I explore the interdisciplinary association of the museum institution and medical science as monumentalizing a linear and exclusionary narrative of progress. I offer alternatives to traditional museum display with the intention of flipping or expanding the freak show model, requiring viewers to evaluate their own aesthetic and affective responses within and outside of the contained museum space.