There's something odd in pop culture right now: the bodies of little people are becoming more visible, more present, but present and visible not as themselves, not as the bodies of persons, not as a way that people are present, exposed, not as a way of being human, but as a figuring of a certain set of contemporary symptoms and fantasies.
I just saw an add for a movie called "Little Man" and then a commercial that placed adult heads on children's bodies. The former relied on a visual arrangement that not only shrunk a typical adult male body (The incredible shrinking man!) but also compressed in and in so doing infantalized it and made it abnormal. The commercial made its figures adult children: adult heads on kids' bodies. So, they were like little people but were not actually little people--it's like they wanted to gesture toward little people without being them, to comment on or evoke them and then in some way twist or refigure the reference.
I would think that folks in disability studies would have much that is helpful on this. I'm not well read on this. More likely, the opposite: I have a passion for "Freaks" (one of us, one of us!) and freak shows (my grandmother claimed to have known an actual geek). I fetishistically follow this material, but not within an academic terrain (other than a kind of Marxist critique of the disabling of people with talents and abilities that enabled them to earn a living exploiting the saps who would go to carnivals and travelling shows).
But, today there seems to be a reappropriation of the little body in a way that effaces those who inhabit little bodies so as to fetishize a kind of adult infant. It turns adults into children--or, privileged adults into spoiled children. We already know that racialized bodies, lower and working class bodies will be called into being as adult subjects capable of responsibility, trial, and execution at ages much, much younger than the privilege youthful exploits of, why not, George W. Bush--drinking, doing coke, destroying companies well into his 30s. What do you call a black man who does this sort of thing?
I read tabloids but rarely watch them. Yet, I think that little people have figured on some of the more disgusting reality shows, perhaps those on VH1. Generally they are figured as hyper sexual--not just mini-me, I don't think. When this kind of a 'ableist' (?) 'sizeist' (?) term ( I put them in quotes because I have to confess that I am not as aware or pc as I would like and these terms strike me as awkward and bizarre) or figure comes to stand in for or signify the adult as child, we have a celebration--without joy--of the worst combination of adult and child: the selfish demands of the child, with the exploitive viciousness and sexuality of the adult.
Yeah, like check out this website.
At least this one isn't a sexual fetishist, I think it's just humor.
And a lot of pictures of them.
Midgets Who Work At Target:
http://www.midgetswhoworkattarget.com
Posted by: Kale | June 09, 2006 at 02:02 AM