Vulgar History Podcast
Humans: A Monstrous History (with Surekha Davies)
January 29, 2025
Hello, and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women’s history comedy podcast, my name is Ann Foster. And before we get into today’s episode, I have late-breaking news about the next Vulgar History in-person meetup. I am going to be in Fort Myers, Florida, and I have time to have a meetup on Friday, February 7th. That’s in, like, two weeks. So, if you’re there, Fort Myers, Florida, a place I have never been before but where I will be attending a wedding, but I have time to meet up with the Tits Out Brigade on Friday, February 7th. So, fill out the form at VulgarHistory.com/Meetup so we can make a plan and figure out where and when we can meet. If anyone out there lives in or near Fort Myers, Florida, again, a city I’ve never been to.
Getting into today’s episode. So, we’re talking with author Surekha Davies. Her new book is called Humans: A Monstrous History. So, she is a historian of science, and this book really connects in really interesting ways here and there with last week’s episode where we were talking with Helen King about her book, Immaculate Forms: A History of the Female Body in Four Parts because, at times, women’s bodies have been seen and discussed and treated as monstrous. Surekha also looks at lots of other monster myths from different legends, stories from various cultures. A lot of it is from, like, the Western world, but also the Americas are involved, there’s stuff in there about the Islamic world, and about Japan, and lots of places. And she connects it all in really fun ways to modern pop culture. She mentions Star Trek is in here, Spider-Man, like Aliens, Wall-E, like, it’s really, really fascinating the way that she makes it. It’s such a fun, readable book. Throughout reading the book, I was just like the Leo Pointing dot GIF.
So many things come up in this book that we’ve talked about before on Vulgar History. Mary Toft is mentioned, Mary Shelley is mentioned because of Frankenstein. She mentions Pedro Gonsalvus, who was the man who had a condition where he was all covered in hair and then he had a daughter, Antionette, who was all covered in hair. And that was when I interviewed Molly Greeley about her novel Marvelous, we talked about that history. This book also talks about John Knox comes up, Catherine de’Medici is involved. And then also in the book, she quotes from two people, at least two people who we’ve had on the show before, a friend of the podcast, Kit Heyam is quoted from their work as well as Greta LaFleur is quoted. And then at the back in the acknowledgments, one of the people she thanks, who is one of her good friends, is Vulgar History past guest, Leah Redmond Chang. So, I was just like, this book is so connected to this podcast. I was just really vibing with it.
So, I feel like you’re really going to enjoy the book. And right now, you’re going to, I think, really enjoy this conversation with author Surekha Davies.
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Ann: So, we are joined today by Surekha Davies, author most recently of Humans: A Monstrous History. Welcome Surekha.
Surekha: Thank you for having me on.
Ann: Can you explain, and I’m sure you’ve been doing a lot of interviews explaining this, what your book is about?
Surekha: Humans: A Monstrous History is what I call a history of humanity told through monsters and monster-making. What I mean by that is the idea of what ‘human’ means has a history; it’s never been an uncontested thing, you know, who is and isn’t human, it’s never been universal, it’s always been changing. And you know, that idea of, kind of, human is something that people have always consciously or unconsciously defined in relation to a whole bunch of other things. Where does the human body end and other kinds of beings begin? Where does the environment begin? Where’s the boundary between humans and animals? What about humans and machines or gods or, say, extraterrestrials?
So, there’s a history of how people have thought about where human ends and all of those external beings begin and you can start that in antiquity. But there’s also a history of how people have defined various categories of humanity, male and female, for example, you know, different ethnicities and religious groups. What all of these categories have lying between them, sometimes invisibly, are monsters. And what I mean by that is any time you have categories, you know, anybody who messes them up is a category breaker. So, it’s possible to trace who has been defined as being on the margins and turning nice, tidy, little separate things into some kind of blended category.
So, it’s a history told through monster-making stories about, you know, who or what was threatening the boundary between human and non-human, or between groups of humans who supposedly deserve different kinds of rights, whether they were women or enslaved people or, you know, people who were framed as having bodies that were so atypical that, for example, they would be performing their strangeness, as it were, at fairs.
Ann: Yeah. And so, there are so many examples in your book. What I want to say is when I was reading it, I just thought… I read it all at once and I was like, I don’t know if this is ideal. I think you need to read this, think about it, come back the next day because there’s so much new information in here because you’re talking about so many different cultures and time periods, some of which I was familiar with, some of which I wasn’t familiar with. How did you go about researching so many different time periods?
Surekha: In a way, I started with my first book, which was about European ideas about peoples of the Americas and the ways in which European mapmakers and geographers had looked at writing about peoples of, you know, Brazil and Mexico coming back from European voyagers’ exploration and framed some of these people as kind of monstrous in some way. That was actually a story that goes back to ancient Greece and Rome, there were theories of understanding the relationship between bodies and nature that said the body was squishy, move somebody to a different climate and their temperament, their constitution will change. So, you know, if you have a medical system in your culture whereby bodies and minds are affected by geography and also at the edges of habitable climates, there are what were called monstrous peoples, then once you’re travelling everywhere, that does beg the question, where’s the boundary between human space and monster space?
So, there I was thinking I was writing a dissertation and then a first book on, you know, the 16th century, Europeans making sense of what they saw in the Americas, but that actually was a story that had a, you know, 1,500-year backstory. So, some of the homework for the new book happened then. And then it was a case of trying to figure out what the big story was going to be. This for me, in a way, is a story I’ve been figuring out since I was a child watching Star Trek. And so, you know, the beings in the universe is one of the things that comes out of Star Trek. Oh my goodness! Are there things that live in space and don’t need air and they travel at the speed of light? Is it possible to be telepathic? So, that kind of range of taxonomy of ways of being a sentient being was something that, I guess, I’d been thinking about for a long time. And when I sat down to devise this book, the original structure was not that different from this one because I thought, well, where are the boundaries between human and monstrous? Will they happen in a variety of places from Earth to outer space? So, the general structure of talking about ecology, animals, different kinds of human groups, and then things like machines and the supernatural, that overarching structure was quite straightforward. And of course, I missed a bit in the middle.
I used to be a history professor, and I used to teach a course on monsters from antiquity to about 1800, before Frankenstein, and that was a sort of Europe and Europe and the Americas kind of course. So, there was all of this homework that got done along the way coming to this book. And with this book, I did think this is an opportunity to talk about monster-making all over the world. In the early drafts, there was a fair amount of all over the world that I wanted to put more all over the world in. But I quickly realized that it’s kind of hard to have any kind of throughline if you’re everywhere. And also, ‘everywhere’ is a fiction. Books that claim to cover the world’s thinking usually talk primarily about maybe five different kinds of thought. That doesn’t actually cover every square mile. So, that’s also a fiction. Oh, we’re going to have China, we’re going to have India, we’re going to have the Islamic world, we’re going to have the… It’s still, like, five or ten, right?
So, I thought, well, I’d like that to be more of a throughline while also giving a sense of the kind of variety. So, for each chapter, I thought about what the range of ways there were for imagining the boundary between the human and that particular thematic, like animals. And I go from the micro with the microbiome, you know, up to the macro, I think about the soul. And then I selected most of my examples from Europe and the Americas in order to tell a story that had some kind of throughline and one that was also a story about how the world as it’s set up today with, you know, a lot of global institutions that are, you know, Eurocentric, how that came to be. So, you know, a lot of my examples from around the world are also ones that help to talk about that interaction between Europe and the wider world.
So, it’s sort of a transregional book that traces various, I think, mysteries. I hope the readers feel a sense of cliffhangers as they go through the chapters. But, you know, each chapter could have been a book, and I guess that’s something that authors often feel when they finish their books.
Ann: Yeah, I love that you mentioned just now, Star Trek, because, in this book, I want listeners to know that you’re explaining all this history, but you’re also tying in contemporary examples, pop culture examples. The first time you mentioned the Ferengi on Deep Space Nine, I was just like, “Oh my god!” [laughs] I was excited, I’m a Star Trek fan. And I do love that you do talk in this about outer space, and aliens, and things like that because that’s not… I’ve never before read about what did people in the 17th century imagine outer space was like, which brings us to one of the examples, which was Margaret Cavendish. Can you just briefly explain who she was? I’ve never heard of her.
Surekha: Sure. So, Margaret Cavendish was an English aristocrat who lived in the 17th century, the first half of the 17th century, thereabouts. She was a teenager when the English Civil War broke out and her family were royalists, they were loyal to the Crown and the Crown, you know, ended up escaping to Oxford, where she became a lady in waiting to Queen Henrietta de Maria, who was the queen of French descent, who would marry Charles I, who got his head chopped off.
So, Margaret Cavendish was this young woman who lived in this very tumultuous time. She ended up, kind of, escaping to France with the queen because it wasn’t safe for them in England. And she became a self-taught polymath. You know, being a woman, she didn’t have the kind of fancy education and going to Oxford kind of life she would have had had she been an aristocratic boy child. But she taught herself, she read. When she was in France, she met her husband, William Cavendish, who had become the first Duke of Newcastle, who was supportive of his wife’s interests. And I guess today, you know, we might call her a content creator today or a hustler because she wrote in so many different forms; she wrote plays, she wrote poetry, she wrote philosophical treatises about science, about atoms, about the nature of matter and souls. And, you know, she wrote a work of science fiction, a work of which, like in Star Trek, she used her imagination to kind of imagine another world in which life unfolded quite differently.
As a woman who was very learned and who actually wrote and published stuff, which is seen as a bit gauche for a woman to do, you know, there were people who thought she was a real weirdo. They called her Mad Madge. The diarist, Samuel Pepys, called her, you know, mad. She was a ridiculous woman, and he said her husband was really foolish to let her write. And so, you know, you could say that Margaret Cavendish was, was monsterified by some of her peers. She was not behaving in a gender-appropriate way. And what she does in her sci-fi novel, you know, description of a world called a “blazing world” because its stars were so bright and blazing. It’s an extraordinary story in which she imagines another kind of world for a woman protagonist.
Ann: I was really caught by that example in your book of Margaret Cavendish. You also mentioned Mary Shelley in Frankenstein and I think, at least in the circles that I operate in online, people are often being like, you know, “Science fiction was invented by a teenage girl,” like Frankenstein. Like, people are always coming up to the defence of Mary Shelley and letting people know that, like, this teenage girl wrote this book that was so important. And then I thought, yeah, but 150 years earlier, this woman kind of invented, [chuckles] Star Trek-like fiction. And so, I think Margaret Cavendish, she deserves to be known as well.
Surekha: She does. The book doesn’t read really like an action novel. You know, it’s not very readable today and probably now all Margaret Cavendish scholars will hate me. It’s compelling, but a difficult read but the plot is extraordinary. We start with something really nasty, this woman is abducted by a merchant who kind of has fallen in love with her and she’s kidnapped onto a ship. And you think like, “Whoa! This is nasty stuff.” But pretty soon this storm blows up and pushes the ship to the North Pole. Gods are angry… Everybody, all the men then freeze to death. It’s kind of hilarious, she’s in her cabin, men freeze to death, eventually, you know, even through the cold and the snow, the flesh starts putrefying and she realizes she can’t sit in the cabin anymore. This all happens in a very deadpan, not exciting way in my view, but it’s like, oh my god, what a plot. And, you know, she goes out on deck and sees that there are these bears who are standing like men.
So, what’s happened is that the North Pole, our Earth touches another Earth, another dimension, and if you go to the North Pole, where you end up is not in the other half of our world, but in their world. And, you know, it turns out that there are all kinds of animals that just walk on their hind legs and speak, not in English. She meets bear men who rescue her, they bury the men’s corpses and boat and carry her— There’s a lot of language of, “Oh, and they carefully carried the woman…” to, you know, the capital city where the emperor married her, she becomes an empress. Part one is this woman who started off abducted, you know, gets into a kind of dialogue with these bear people and fox men and various animal people and negotiates that they’re, you know, she becomes interested in kind of meeting this and this powerful man and she happily marries him.
Then we have this huge section where Margaret Cavendish really goes to town on what it would be like to be a woman who is able to have extensive conversations about physics, about mechanics, about biology, about even monsters, about alchemy and chemistry. And, you know, she has audiences, all of these different animals that have different expertise. You know, there are eight men who are chemists, bird men who are astronomers, which I think is kind of cute because of course birds know something about the sky, and so on. And she, you know, develops her own, kind of, ninja intellectual skills, eventually saves her world from danger by inventing some special weapon. You know, finally, in the third section of the book, she talks through a portal with the author, so the Duchess of Newcastle. And so, Margaret Cavendish gives herself, you know, a role in this book as the person who becomes the scribe of the woman heroine who ran off to this amazing city, having started off as a kidnap victim.
You know, here and there, Lady Margaret Cavendish says, you know, “I wasn’t able to be a conqueror. I couldn’t be Alexander or Caesar because I’m a woman. So, I have imagined this world where that’s possible.” So, she’s imagined a world in which, you know, it’s the kind of women who are the heroines and who tell that story and have a happily ever after life.
Ann: I don’t know if you’re familiar with a book that— I interviewed this author last week and there’s a lot, there’s some beautiful overlap between her work and your work that I thought, like, these two books would read really well together. It’s Helen King’s book, Immaculate Forms: A History of the Female Body in Four Parts.
Surekha: Oh, great! Thank you. I’ve seen some of the media for that. I’m writing that down.
Ann: So, I read her book last week and interviewed her and now I’m interviewing you. And you both have a similar concept at one point in both of your books where you talk about how in much of Western history, the female body was seen as monstrous and something to fear, and something to tame, and something to be concerned about. And now, we’re seeing a similar thing about trans people and how that’s the new, sort of, monstrous thing.
Surekha: Definitely.
Ann: Yeah. Can you talk a bit about just what you say about that in your book?
Surekha: Where to start? Maybe I could start in the early modern where there was this notion of monstrous bodies, which also goes back to antiquity. The thing is, who gets to decide what constitutes a monstrous body? I mean, that’s the story. And all monsters, I say somewhere, something like, “Monsters are works of the imagination, but all of them are real.” You know, monsters are imaginary, but all of them are real and it’s because ‘monster’ is actually a label and it’s an observer who has decided these are a bunch of normal categories, “normal” and here’s someone who doesn’t fit and that means, by my definition, they’re a monster, they are failing to fit a category.
Of course, people who challenge categories were often seen and still are as threats, they’re kind of threats to the self. And, you know, I think the word ‘monster’ may feel kind of strong to, you know, a 21st-century person coming across this today. What does this mean for people’s lives? It means that people got treated differently. They lost their right to bodily autonomy, to privacy, to dignity. For example, there’s this little girl called Antoinette Gonsalvus, who in the mid-16th century was examined by a physician all over her body because she was unusually hairy. She was one of a small family of people, most of whom had a lot of hair, you know, all over most of their faces and bodies.
Every so often there is in the sources, you know, accounts of people who saw or inspected the bodies of, you know, these children or people who were too hairy or of people who were intersex. At the Royal Society, the premier scientific institution in England in the 17th century, there would be, you know, people who the physicians of the National Society would talk about having inspected. This was a situation that sometimes, you know, parents who were very poor and had atypically embodied children, sometimes sort of without hands or what today, you know, might be called kind of Siamese twins. These children would be shown for money and in some cases, adults who were intersex were coerced into being shown both at popular fairs and in scientific settings.
But, you know, where woman ends and man ends and what that leaves in between, there has always been a continuum, but scientists will tell you today the fact that the continuum isn’t even doesn’t mean that there isn’t one. In early Christianity, Christian thinkers debated whether the original human being might actually be androgynous. So, before Eve was split off from Adam, you know, was that original being actually sexless or were they both sexes? So, that question of the relationship between male and female and whether there was a continuum, whether anybody in the continuum was a threat, that has not been a fixed story, not even in the West and not in other places either. But deciding that certain groups are threats is something that over time we’ve seen move from homophobia through to now the, kind of, anti-trans movement, and those fears also look very like the monstrification language used at times against women, at times against Jews.
But, you know, there is still that question of, all right, so you’ve declared that trans people are a problem. How are you going to identify one? What’s it going to take? You know, does every school child whose birth certificate says girl, are they going to have to show, you know, their private parts before they can do PE or be on a sports team? Is that really where, you know, the future of humanity wants to head?
Ann: And it’s something about—and you talk about this in your book as well—the concept of a monster, it can be a way to unite people against a common enemy or just…
Surekha: Vulnerable group.
Ann: Yeah. And we see this playing out a lot right now in the UK and in the US and lots of places, like, immigrants or… It’s a way to unite disparate groups by inventing a boogeyman and saying, like, everything that you’re upset with, everything that’s wrong with your life, it’s because of this group rather than it’s because of what the government has done. Rather, it’s because of what capitalism has done. So, it’s a way to sort of divert people’s attention.
Surekha: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And I guess a kind of striking example of that is the laws that were called the Black Codes in the kind of 17th century, you know, European colonies in the Americas. There was a point when plantation workers were comprised of poor indentured servants from Europe, so white-presenting servants, and enslaved Africans who were brought over forcibly. What you see developing is these, kind of, different councils in different places. You know, in Barbados and Jamaica, they wrote laws to define enslaved Africans as a legal category, and what they called white Christian servants as a different category. So, you had Black slaves and white Christian servants, and different laws applied to them.
So, immediately you are kind of undercutting worker solidarity. There would be different punishments, there would be rewards for capturing an enslaved person who escaped. And it was also a form of monstrification. So, if you declared that, you know, one group was chattel slave, sorry, chattel property for life, they were never going to stop being living property, they declared that an enslaved African is enslaved for life. Then there were laws about any children of enslaved women, laws that decreed that the child would have the same condition as the mother effectively decreed that enslavers who had children with enslaved women, their children basically became objects. So, you know, enslavers loved property more than they loved their own children. I mean, you know, it’s kind of an unthinkable thing for us today.
Ann: Treating… Yeah, it’s like the legal definition of some humans as not human.
Surekha: Yeah, yeah. And also disappearing the continuum. You know, “There’s no multiracial.” And that’s a kind of monster-making process to define, to erase that continuum, to create penalties for anyone being in that continuum. The South African comedian Trevor Noah talks about this. I mean, the title of his autobiography is Born A Crime, because it was illegal to have mixed-race children when he was born. He was hidden away in his early childhood and that’s monstrification in…
Ann: Absolutely, yeah. To me, just over and over in your book and everything you just described as well, there is a defence that’s like, “Well, this is the natural state of things and so these laws are just to ensure that things are kept in this proper way.” But it’s like, well, if it’s the natural state, then you wouldn’t need a law because people wouldn’t be doing this. Like, if you have to make a law to enforce behaviour, then it’s clearly not a natural thing.
Surekha: Exactly. And it’s clearly also not a, you know, oh, law is coming now so what’s been going on since the beginning of time when there wasn’t a law?
Ann: Yeah. You also mentioned in your book… On this podcast, I did a whole series about Mary, Queen of Scots, and in that, John Knox emerged as quite a villain amongst myself and the listeners. He is… [laughs] We make fun of John Knox a lot and I was really excited in your book, you talk about John Knox in an unflattering way. So, I was like, “Oh, one of us. Great.” [both chuckle] I was like, “Oh, that’s right,” because his book, it’s called The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. So, he is like, monsters, of course. Yeah, can you explain about him and his deal?
Surekha: Yeah. So, this is a kind of weird and creepy deal. So, Knox was really angry that there was a Catholic on the throne in England. So, Mary I, who was also married to a Spanish king, like, oh, my god! Even worse. So, he wrote this pamphlet that he initially published anonymously, and the thrust of the pamphlet was that it is really bad to have a kingdom ruled by a woman. He used words like ‘abominable’ and ‘monster’ over and over again. It was against nature that a woman was ruling.
But what he was actually crossed about was that Mary wasn’t an Anglican. The way he wanted to destabilize Mary, I mean, his tactic was actually to leverage the kind of misogyny of the moment by saying that, “Well actually, it would be perfectly patriotic to rebel against the monstrous regiment of a woman monarch because a woman at the head of the body politic is like a monstrous birth,” and he drew those comparisons. So, he was encouraging insurrection by saying it wouldn’t be insurrection because this Commonwealth was such an abomination to be headed by a fake. So, he’s kind of trolling queens in order to destabilize a Catholic monarch. So, rather than going directly after the religion, he tried another tactic. Unfortunately for him, Mary died fairly quickly and by the time his pamphlet came out, it was Elizabeth I, who was an Anglican, who was on the throne. So, he was not flavour of the month for her.
Ann: Well, and just the way you describe his tactic, we see this today, constantly.
Surekha: Yes! Who are you going to monstrify? Maybe for some completely different agenda.
Ann: Well, and also, I think if you’re really upset about one thing, but it happens to be a woman who’s doing it, you can be like, “I just don’t think this is right.” Where it’s like, that’s an easy way to get a lot of people on board to be like, “Yeah, this also doesn’t feel right to me. There’s just something about her I don’t like.” And maybe it’s her race or it’s her sex but really, what you don’t like is her politics. You know?
Surekha: Yeah. But then you’d have to argue on substance and persuade on the thing that you’ve decided is going to be a harder sell.
Ann: Exactly. Whereas the monstrification, it’s so easy to tap into that for people when it’s just purely emotion and fear and hatred.
Surekha: Yeah, and there’s a reservoir, this is an ancient cultural reservoir, of monster-making stories and techniques. These are things people… You know, it’s worth being aware of that.
Ann: Another story that you mentioned briefly in your book, and I was excited that you did because this is another episode we did in this podcast, was Mary Toft, the woman who claimed to give birth to rabbits. We did a whole episode about it, but I thought— Yeah, because you’re talking about the concept in that time and place, it helped me understand her story a bit better, that whatever pregnant women thought about or saw could manifest in what she gave birth to.
Surekha: Yeah, it’s an extraordinary additional way of heaping blame and responsibility on women. I mean, not only were they, “monstrous” because they failed to be born as men, as the ancient Greek naturalist Aristotle put it, but they were also kind of potential monster incubators. They might give birth to someone who looked monstrous because the mother had been fantasizing about some monstrous or alternative person.
So, you know, Mary Toft was this unfortunate woman who suffered a miscarriage in the early 18th century and it seems as if someone who was there at the birth, the organ grinder’s wife, decided to encourage Mary Toft to capitalize on this misfortune by pretending that she could give birth to rabbits. It’s really rather disturbing. I kind of read more of the material than I could actually kind of bring myself to inflict on unsuspecting readers. So, this kind of woman would keep providing Mary Toft with rabbits whenever a doctor came to examine her and Mary, with a sleight of hand, would produce rabbits. But then she became really upset and just blamed the people around her for having encouraged her at this kind of moment of trauma and grief to be involved in a confidence trick.
Ann: Part of one of the reasons why I started this podcast is just to share stories with people who wanted to hear them rather than inflicting them on my friends all the time.
Surekha: Aha!
Ann: And the Mary Toft story, when I tell that to somebody, often they’re just like, they don’t understand how… why was that the plan? Why would that make them money? Like, it’s such a weird thing to do to be like, “Oh, I just gave birth to dead rabbit parts.” Understandably, people today are like, “How is that going to… Why would anyone be excited about that?” But people… Like about the Gonsalvus family and just people with like birth differences were brought to dinner parties and displayed; people at that time, like in England at the time, were just so interested in in the body and things that seemed unnatural and things that were unusual. That’s where kings and queens would be excited, they would find, like, a little person and be like, “Oh, great. I’m going to add them to my household.” People were really excited about differences in a monster way. Not in like, “Oh, let’s embrace these people,” but more like, “Oh, a monster. Great.”
Surekha: “They’re my collection.”
Ann: Yes, yes, exactly.
Surekha: Yeah, it was, you know, I guess it was kind of voyeuristic, it was also a form of entertainment. And, you know, in the 19th century, there were all kinds of fairs and exhibitions at which not only can individuals who are unusually embodied, like people who are very tall and were called giants would just be intense and people paid money to go and see them. But also, people from distant parts of the world, you know, from Patagonia, from Southeast Asia would be either conned or kidnapped, coerced, and brought to be in scenes where, again, the fee-paying public in London could go to a venue and be sort of a tourist and look at what you could call just these, you know, human zoos.
But there was this, kind of, veneer of education around these events as well. There would be publications in the actual scientific media about this lost tribe member, member of a lost tribe who had been found and brought, and language like “the missing link” appears in a lot of these pamphlets. So, there’s something of a sensational kind of bent to anthropology. And even before Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was published, you know, there was this appetite for thinking about where human ended and ape began, and that ‘missing link’ language was very much part of it.
Ann: Have you ever seen the movie The Greatest Showman, the Hugh Jackman movie?
Surekha: No, is that about P.T. Barnum?
Ann: Yes, yes. I am not a fan of P.T. Barnum in general, I think making a movie to portray him as this altruistic champion of the differently-abled is a real choice.
Surekha: Gosh, yes.
Ann: But what the movie does show is that some people, and this is a thing that I’ve read about that’s happened, the bearded lady or whoever, it’s like you don’t fit into the society that you’re in but then within the circus, you can find success, you can find a career. So, there was a way that some people, little people were able to… you know, an exploitative career but it was a way that if “Okay, if you’re going to call me a monster, then at least pay me for it,” sort of thing.
Surekha: It was a, you know, they didn’t necessarily have many alternatives and this was one of them. Perhaps at something like a circus or affair, there would be lots of people with, you know, kind of unusual skills, people who are differently-abled, who are unusually embodied. So, while someone might be the only bearded lady at a circus, there would be others who would, you know, be facing the same kinds of stigma and challenges for, you know, other ways of being.
Ann: There’s a movie, actually, if I’m going to recommend a movie to you, there’s a movie called Freaks. It’s from, I think, the 1930s and it’s a movie that actually casts actual people from circus freak shows. It’s one of the earliest/only movies to have, like, differently abled people as characters in a movie. My friend, Kristen Lopez, is writing a book about disability in film and I know that that’s going to be one that she talks about just because it’s… It’s just interesting, like, the monstrification is from the point of view of the oppressor, for lack of a better word. But then the people themselves, like, what are those lives like? Like, how do you live when all of society sees you as a monster? And then things like this movie kind of show, like, they’re playing roles, they’re characters, the people who have all the… People you’ve never seen film even now. So, it’s kind of the other side of that. And again, it’s exploitive in a way, like people want to see this movie to be like, “Ooh, let’s see all these circus freaks,” but like, they were paid, they were actors. It’s just such a complex thing where it’s, like, the world creates monsters and it always has but how do you still live when people call you a monster?
Surekha: And, you know, people tried to, you know, protect themselves and their body and have some kind of agency over their bodies. There was, you know, famously, this man called Charles Byrne who was known as the Irish giant. He chose to perform at fairs and I guess, you know, given whatever options he had, I mean, this was the one that he chose. But he left instructions that he shouldn’t be displayed after his death, and he left some money so that he could be given a sea burial. And, you know, he died in his late twenties, he was so very tall that, you know, his heart couldn’t pump through his body forever. And what happened? The surgeon, John Hunter, ended up buying his body because he bribed the fishermen to just discount Byrne’s wishes.
And it didn’t end there; Hunter had Byrne’s skeleton boiled in a kettle, which he later donated to the British Medical Association. I ended up accidentally coming across Charles Byrne’s skeleton when I was wandering around the Hunterian Museum in London about 10 years ago. The first thing I saw was this very, very tall skeleton and then there was a little label that said, you know, “This was his life. He didn’t want to be displayed after his death.” And so, I was implicated in, you know, this disavowal. So, you know, what was it about Charles Byrne that meant that what he wanted for his remains didn’t matter? It wasn’t even as if the remains at that moment were being used only for “science,” it was in a case. I didn’t have to even pay money, I don’t think, to go into that museum to see him.
Byrne’s skeleton has now come off display. I think it was a couple of years later when that happened. The museum reopened spring of 2023 and I went back and as they had promised, they did not put him back on display, nor did they bury him at sea. So, his bones are still available for bona fide these, kind of, medical researchers. So, there we are.
Ann: So, even after death, the exploitation… There is a museum— I’m just saying things off the top of my head, I didn’t research this before we talked. But in the US, there’s a museum that recently, I think they closed because there was…
Surekha: The Mütter Museum? In Philadelphia?
Ann: Yeah! That had all these body parts and things. And then it was like, this isn’t cool. Don’t display this stuff. And it was a huge thing. What was that? Do you know?
Surekha: Yes, that was the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia which had a great many skeletons and specimens of body parts, if I remember correctly, in jars, I’ve only been to it once. But, you know, many of those many of those human remains were not obtained in conditions where, you know, the people who were giving them up had much choice. So, there is that question of what has been done to people’s bodies or the bodies of their kin without consent. And yet… Was it called the Morbid Anatomy Museum? No, that’s a different museum in Brooklyn. And yet it was also a place where, you know, for some people, it was a place to go and see differently embodied people and differently abled people, rather than their presence in the world, never being something that was recorded in museums. So, that was the controversy, you know, around the fact that they closed to decide how to re-display and what to re-display.
Ann: I’m glad that you knew that. It just occurred to me. But you knew the museum name off the top of your head and I appreciate that.
So, your book, Humans: A Monstrous History, you’ve, I am sure, been talking to lots of people about this book and going and doing various events. Where can people keep up with you and know what events you’re doing and that sort of thing?
Surekha: Oh, thanks for asking! I have a newsletter hosted by Buttondown. It’s called “Notes From an Everything Historian,” it’s totally free. You can even download a free extract from Humans: A Monstrous History if you subscribe. I post my events there. My most active social media channel by far is Bluesky, so do come and find me there. And my website is SurekhaDavies.org and that will help readers find all the places where I am. I will be on a book tour in the US from the 1st of March to the 18th of April, and I have a couple of events in London at the very end of April. And there are a handful of online, free Zoom book conversations and book lectures starting on February 19th. So, do come and find me to learn more about them.
Ann: That’s wonderful. And I mean, clearly, just from this conversation, you’re so passionate about this topic and so knowledgeable about it. I think it’ll be great to be able to share that with people and hopefully convince them all to read your book, which I really, really enjoyed and I really recommend.
Surekha: Thank you.
Ann: Thank you so much for joining me today. I was really looking forward to this. And this is such a good conversation.
Surekha: Thanks so much for having me. This has been great fun.
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So, the book Humans: A Monstrous History by Surekha Davies is available in… I think it’s available in various different countries. Sometimes we have an author on here and the book is, like, only in North America or it’s only in Europe. But this one, everywhere, I think. And as Surekha mentioned, you can go to her website, SurekhaDavies.org and you can keep up with what she’s doing, sign up for her newsletter, find her on social media, all those kinds of things.
Again, if you want to meet up with me in Fort Myers, Florida, I’m going to be there on Friday, February 7th with some time to hang out with the gang so go to VulgarHistory.com/Meetup if you’re there and want to join the first-ever, on US soil, Vulgar History meet up.
And just other things to let you know about. So, I have this new mailing list. I know at the end of this, I’m always like “Social media, blah, blah, blah.! Here’s all the places to follow me.” And basically, if you’re on any social media, look up Vulgar History and I’m probably there, and if I’m not there, I’ll probably be there tomorrow because I like to claim that domain on all the social medias. But if you want to just get sort of, like, regular updates, both as things are heating up, you know, I’m doing these live events, I’ve got this book that’s going to be coming out, there will be book updates. If you want to get like once a month, just kind of like a short highlight of, like, what’s up with Vulgar History? What’s up with Ann Foster? What’s up with Hepburn Foster (who is my cat)? I’ll send you one email every month on this mailing list and you can sign up for that. Oh also, I put in book recommendations and movie recommendations because that is the thing that I am always happy to share. Anyway, if you want to get this, like, once, monthly mailing list, this is going to be, I think, moving forward, probably one of the best ways to keep in touch with me as social media keeps being very strange. Anyway, you can sign up for this at VulgarHistory.com/News. You can also follow me on Substack, which I guess is kind of a social media thing as well. I write essays there about women in history every other week. So, if you go to VulgarHistory.Substack.com, I am also there.
And then the other kind of main way where I would suggest being able to follow me is if you join my Patreon. So, we recently just got over 800 Patreon members; we had a little Patreon party, which was just kind of like in the comments section of the post. But it’s a growing community and it’s a place where you can interact with other members of the Tits Out Brigade, there’s chats there and stuff. So, if you join the Patreon, what you get at the free level is you’ll be updated more than once a month, probably. The mailing list, that’s for people who just, like, want to have one thing with all the stuff in it. Patreon, I share links there, just talking about various things that are of interest… The sort of stuff that one might formerly have found on my Instagram page, I’m sharing that more on Patreon now, just because it’s a way that I know that people who want to follow my content are able to see it without being the victim of some sort of algorithm. And you can follow me on Patreon for free. You go to Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter and you can choose a little free membership.
Or if you want to get a little bit more from Patreon, if you pledge $1 a month, you get early access to all episodes as well as ad-free access to all upcoming and past episodes of Vulgar History. And then if you pledge $5 or more a month, you get all the above plus also bonus episodes. So, that’s stuff like The Aftershow where I talk with some and some of the guests about topics, not… we just get to talking and so I put that there so that the actual Vulgar History episodes can try to stay on topic, slightly. But also, at the $5 a month level, you get access to our whole archive of Vulgarpiece Theatre episodes for Allison Epstein, Lana Wood Johnson, and myself talk about costume dramas. We’re on a bit of a hiatus from that because Allison, Lana and I are all incredibly busy. But once we’re back, you can hear new episodes. But there’s a really good archive there; each episode is, like, three hours long so you’ve got a good amount of content there if you just join. And also, episodes of So This Asshole, which is the spin-off podcast where I talk about shitty men from history.
Also, anyone who joins the Patreon at the $5 a month or more level, you get to join our Discord, which is, like, a big group chat where we’re talking about everything we’re talking about at the moment, The Traitors, both American and UK versions, but also people share pictures of their cats. We’re providing emotional support for people living through unprecedented times, but also sharing memes and jokes, book recommendations, movie recommendations. I’m there a lot. If you want to know what I’m what I’m working on and thinking about, I try to post there very regularly.
We also have our brand partner, Common Era Jewelry. So, this is a small women-owned business that creates beautiful heirloom jewelry pieces inspired by women from history and also by history in general. So, the pieces are made in New York City— I’m so sorry. The pieces are made in New York Citayyy, so everyone involved has health care and good wages. The packaging is made by a little family-owned business in Chicago. So, if you want to support a small business, those are all good, you know, ethical reasons to do so but also, the jewelry is gorgeous and very feminist. So, the designs are inspired by classical mythology/women from history. They have some pendant necklaces and rings that have the profile, like a picture that Torie, the owner, has created, she’s designed, of women from history. Cleopatra is there, Agrippina is there, Hatshepsut is there, Anne Boleyn snuck her way in there and also people from mythology like Hecate, Medusa was a very big seller. Every time there’s some sort of shitty, like, patriarchal shitty thing happens in American news, it seems like a lot of people want to get the Medusa pendant and I feel that strongly.
Anyway, so their pieces are available in solid gold, as well as in more affordable gold vermeil. And I think they would make for a very good Valentine’s Day gift for yourself, Galentine’s Day for oneself. Or if you’re somebody who, like, someone is buying you a Valentine’s Day gift, send them the link to get one of these pieces. And when you send them a link, you should use the code everyone should use, which is CommonEra.com/Vulgar, because then you get 15% off all items. Or you could also use code ‘VULGAR’ at checkout.
You know what else is a great Valentine’s Day gift is Vulgar History merchandise. I feel like you should also request that, and/or Galentine’s Day, get it, get it for your gal pals. You know what? Several months ago, the most incredible thing happened. Tits Out Brigade member, well, first I saw in my merch store, I had sold a whole bunch of I think it was The Flying Squadron theme, which was the Catherine de’Medici’s, like, lady spies, ladies in waiting, it was a whole bunch of just that theme. Like that’s one of the designs we have in the store. And I’m like, “Why is somebody buying so many?” It was stickers, I think. And then I was tagged, I think, on Instagram and that is when I realized it was because a Tits Out Brigade member was having a bridal shower and the theme of the bridal shower was the Flying Squadron, was Vulgar History/The Flying Squadron. They did, like, a silks flying thing. It was amazing. And I think like if you have a gal pal, you know what? Have a bridal shower, have a baby shower, have a party for yourself and make the theme the Reformation Renaissance Squad. Make it make the theme be, like, John Knox yelling “Whoooores!” There’s lots of stuff there. Like, just get your ladies, grab your florals and just celebrate. So, you can also get in touch with me— Oh, sorry, I didn’t say the merch you can get at VulgarHistory.com/Store, that’s great for anyone in the Americas or I guess in North America, basically in the US. If you’re outside the US, you can shop at VulgarHistory.Redbubble.com where shipping is a lot more reasonable. All the same stuff is available in both of the merch stores.
Get in touch with me if you would like to. If you go to VulgarHistory.com., there’s a little “Contact me” button and that sends me an email and I always love to hear from all of you. Next week, what a treat I have in store for you. So, next week, February is starting, February is Black History Month in America and Canada. And I’ve got such an amazing— It’s like, I had my whole several weeks of content planned out and then I read this book and I was like, “I need to have this author on. I need to tell this story on the podcast.” So, it’s practically an emergency episode because I was just so excited about this book and this author and the story and the real-life figure behind it. So, it’s a special it’s a Black History Month special episode coming up next week. Until then, everyone, keep your pants on and your tits out. I’ll talk to you all next time.
Vulgar History is hosted, written, and researched by Ann Foster, that’s me! The editor is Cristina Lumague. Theme music is by the Severn Duo. The Vulgar History show image is by Deborah Wong. Transcripts are written by Aveline Malek. Find transcripts of recent episodes at VulgarHistory.com.
References:
Buy a copy of Humans: A Monstrous History.
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RSVP to the Vulgar History meetup in Fort Myers, Florida!
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Sign up for the Vulgar History mailing list!
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Get 15% off all the gorgeous jewellery and accessories at common.era.com/vulgar or go to commonera.com and use code VULGAR at checkout
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Get Vulgar History merch at vulgarhistory.com/store (best for US shipping) and vulgarhistory.redbubble.com (better for international shipping)
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Support Vulgar History on Patreon
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