Lecture by Prof. Glenn Peers: Community and Difference: Freaks and Byzantine “Healing”

Time: 6pm GMT / 1PM EST  

Nearly every film dealing with disability falls into the error of the ‘narrative prosthetic’, wherein another character’s disability becomes a mechanism for the normative lead to reach positive self-realization. The only film dealing with disability that has avoided this condescension is a 1932 Hollywood production, Freaks, directed by Tod Brown. Diverse bodies, startling still to contemporary sensibilities, are foregrounded in the film, the actors are given real agency within the narrative, and the people are allowed to express themselves fully and distinctively. And they exact their revenge on the ‘normals’. This paper seeks to perform a thought experiment in which Freaks is the lens by which we look at and try to understand Byzantine scenes of ‘healing’. The scare quotes indicate this paper’s position: the images seldom show healing as such, and perhaps they do imply whole bodies are coming in the next frame, but they still simply reveal non-normative bodies, graced by the presence of divinity. This paper, then, looks at some images from the art of Byzantium and reflects on them from a perspective granted by the extraordinary ‘freaks’ of the film. Were Byzantine artists able to produce empathetic representations of the diversely-abled persons they knew? Can they speak to our own conflicts and ambivalences like Freaks does, if only we ask different questions? 

To attend the lectures and more information, complete the contact form on https://byzantine-disability-hub.leeds.ac.uk/events/invited-lecture-prof-glenn-peers/.