In the summer of 2022, I attended the VariAbilities conference hosted by The Ringling Circus Museum in Sarasota, Florida. As a part of the program, presenters were invited to tour the museum’s extensive circus and print archive. Among these artifacts were a small collection of photo albums that featured both named and unnamed performers of the twentieth century. During their lifetime, these performers—now hidden away in drawers—were sometimes local celebrities, with audiences who would travel across state lines to see them perform. While viewing their remains, I found myself wonderstruck, a feeling sometimes so abrupt that it heaves us into the conscious presence of others.
I was moved to behold them, to linger on their photos just a second longer in the hopes I might somehow get to know them, which I later realized was an impulse toward ethical care. It goes without saying that I do not know any of the figures that people the drawers at the Ringling Museum, but my affective experience of wonder as their images were lifted before me directed my attention and care toward them in ways that I attempt to explore in this short essay. In doing so, I deploy the language of the “relic” as a means to understand the ways disability prompts the affective experience of wonder and how that experience may function in moral development.
Encountering the Disability Relic
The Ringling Circus Museum abounds with disability relics. Several photobooks with the word “Freak” printed on their covers perform a kind of curation of early twentieth century “marvels,” many of whom had audiences that would travel across state lines to see them perform again and again. Their images were reproduced in marketing materials, including postcards and “pitch” cards, which were collected and clustered together alongside news clippings announcing and reviewing their performances. For example, the Ringling holds several pitch cards of Frieda Pushnik, who was born without arms or legs and began performing in 1933. Like other sideshow performers, Pushnik would sell her pitch cards to audiences for additional revenue and, for an additional fee, even sign them. Like Tripp, she was a painter and reportedly won “hand” writing competitions, an especially remarkable enterprise that draws attention to the ableist assumptions about writing lurking in such contests. You can catch a glimpse of her calligraphy in one of her signed pitch cards found in the collections. Strikingly, the portrait displays Pushnik in a traditional pose for portraiture. Her expression is dignified, and her posture reveals—almost revels in—an embodiment that came to be known through her stage epithet: “the little half girl.” I present Pushnik’s photographic remains here as exemplary of the many disability relics at the Ringling Museum; however, like the human body, these relics are spectacularly varied.
An almost complete opposite to Pusnik’s distinguished portrait, Stanislaus Berent’s pitch card verges on the unseemly by uncomfortably portraying him as a helpless animal. Born with phocomelia (literally “seal arm,” from the Greek and the inspiration behind his stage name “Sealo”), Berent parodies his diagnosis, capitalizing on a medical system that marked him as inhuman at birth. Like Pushnik, Berent was an artist: while many of his performances included the completion of mundane tasks such as shaving, he would also create small clay figurines. It is difficult to parse this particular pitch card’s tone, but given Berent’s wide regard as incredibly productive and capacious, one can’t help but sense that the joke is not on “Sealo,” but rather on us, his audience. And, that is a punchline worth laughing at.
Preserving, rather than eliminating, experiences of disability calls us to an orientation of wonder that scholars have traced back to admiratio: an attitude that begins in praise and invites us to move towards one another, rather than shrink away.
Toward an Ethic of Admiration
As the archivist opened drawer after drawer, lifting the evidence of disability life, I found myself similarly “lifted.” Here were “extraordinary” people—performers who, during their lifetime, were known and celebrated by others, albeit in sometimes complicated and even compromised ways—now concealed in a dark drawer. Struck by what appeared to us as the boundless bodies of these so called “freaks,” we were overcome by the boundless feeling they engendered within us. This feeling of wonder reaches beyond mere curiosity. A kind of opening forms when one comes face to face with relics of disabled life. This widening gap mobilizes the beholder to a desire to know the object of their wonder, rather than to cold, detached analysis.
Of course, how that space is filled or how we traverse that gap remains mutable and spontaneous in every iteration. The modern, disenchanted subject may respond in any number of negative ways: pity, disgust, disdain, or contempt, to name only a few. And yet, by reframing artifacts of disability culture and experience as sacred relics, I hope to suggest a more deliberate motion where the encounter is marked by admiration. This is an especially important adjustment for biomedical decision-making, where the value and quality of a human life is often weighed, found wanting in some way, and as a result, vigorously rehabilitated. In many respects, this is not a new claim: in 1991, Arthur W. Frank charged clinicians to “recognize the wonder of the body rather than try to control it” (Frank 1991, 59) and more recently, the rise of “wonder labs” in healthcare challenge practitioners to engage in a “wondrous gaze” to “resonate” with and better understand their patients (Hansen 2020).
To be clear, while an ethic of admiration does resist the ableist myth of control, it does not reject all medical practice or treatment. Instead, an ethic of the ilk that I’m proposing follows the logic that wonder-induced admiration is neither an emotion nor is it a methodology meant to replace the development and ongoing discussions around best practices in medical care. Indeed, such a proposition would fall headfirst into that dominating impulse to diagnose and rehabilitate—the selfsame disposition that goads us to mere curiosity and Frank’s illusory ideal of control. Rather, wonder-fueled admiration is an attitude, an intentional and habitual disposition predicated on an approbation of the unusual. H. Martyn Evans describes this orientation as an “intensified and compelling attention, in which the ordinary is presented to us anew, commingled with and suffused by the aspects of the extraordinary” (Evans 2015, 49). It is an ethical posture reflected in and animated by the vagaries of life which caper nimbly around us in what Shakespeare calls the “infinite variety” of human embodiment (Shakespeare 1995).
References
Evans, H.M. 2015. “Wonder and the Patient,” Journal of Medical Humanities 36(1): 47-58.
Frank, Arthur. 1991. At the Will of the Body: Reflections on Illness, Houghton Mifflin.
Hansen, Finn Thorbjørn and Lene Bastrup Jørgensen. 2020. “A contribution to the Ontology of the Fundamentals of Care Framework from a Wonder-Based Approach,” Journal of Clinical Nursing 29 (11-12): 1797-1807. DOI: 10.1111/jocn.15272.
Shakespeare, William. 1995 [1623]. Antony and Cleopatra, ed. John Wilders. The Arden Shakespeare third Series.
Photograph Permissions
Unknown photographer
Untitled (Frieda Pushnik), no date
Black & White Photo Print, 7 9/16 x 9 9/16 in. (19.2 x 24.3 cm), ht0001333
Courtesy of The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Tibbals Circus Collection
Angeleno Photo Service
Untitled (Sealo), 1954
Black & White Photo Print, 5 7/16 x 3 1/2 in. (13.8 x 8.9 cm), ht0001329
Courtesy of The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Tibbals Circus Collection
Cover Photo courtesy of “University of Southern California Libraries” and “California Historical Society.” Digitally reproduced by the USC Digital Library.
