Watch "Monster" by Kanye West, then read Latoya Peterson's "Black Monsters/White Corpses: Kanye's Racialized Gender Politics" and assess Peterson's reading of the video. Do you think that she's correct in assessing that "Kanye is...upholding the ideals of white supremacy" or is she tailoring the video to meet her own expectations? Clarify and support your answer.

Freaks--"One of Us, One of Us"

In her article "'Gooble-Gabble, One of Us': Grotesque Rhetoric and the Victorian Freak Show" (1997), Christine Fergusson argues that "what bother[s] me [is] the ease with which we [are] able smugly to dismiss the gawking attitudes of the Victorians, who recognized only difference in the freak body, and assume a moral high ground via our own contemporary attitudes to bodily abnormality. We live in a society which has, since the turn of the last century, increasingly attempted to view the freak as 'one of us,' whoever and whatever the 'us' may be....however, the relatively recent move to domesticate or normalize extreme physical difference has consistently failed to be less voyeuristic, less gratuitous, than prior attitudes towards abnormality" (245).

Consider this claim in the intervening 14 years since this article's publication. In what way has physical abnormality been incorporated into the social mainstream or does it remain the unseen, the unspoken, monstrified by its relegation to the cultural shadows? Asses what is at stake in any such incorporation or excision.