So this week we discussed femininity as an institution on tuesday and then on thursday we considered how the culture of "freaks" has developed. I started thinking about how a "culture of freaks" somewhat exists with ways in which women go against the norms of femininity. If women are not following standards and practices that adhere to norms about femininity, they then become deviants in our minds. Culture creates the idea of a freak just like it creates ideas about femininity and how it should be enacted by women.
So are women indeed meeting the definition of a "freak" if they are not adhering to the standards of femininity? It seems freaks need to meet the most extreme ideas of abnormality and are not just simply deviant in one or two ways. So maybe a radical feminist or the idea of a radical feminist that some people have may represent some kind of "freak of culture" in the way that they stand up against femininity. I may be making a far stretch in trying to connect these ideas, but I guess I'm just trying to point out how the idea of "freak" can be considered in different and more complex contexts. Today's culture has allowed room for many different kinds of freaks and therefore it is hard to differentiate what really fits in these definitions that Garland-Thomas and Bogdan provide us.
-Meghan Ras
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