Timothy Treadwell's Grizzly Love as Freak Show

When in undergraduate courses I have screened Grizzly Man, Werner Herzog's compelling film about Timothy Treadwell, many student responses tend to resemble those common in the culture at large. They believe Treadwell was insane. Several of the students, like commentators about Treadwell on the Internet and elsewhere, further suggest that he deserved to die for engaging in so foolhardy an undertaking as living with grizzly bears.1 This reception of Treadwell often turns upon ostensibly common sense ideas about what is or is not normal. The notion of putting one's body at risk, for instance, is often taken as crazy, though of course most of us do this daily in different contexts, such as when driving on freeways. Or the idea of communicating with animals, naming them, especially expressing love for them—these all seem unusual and questionable, particularly when those animals are wild bears. However, imputations of abnormality in such cases often take much of their cultural power from how ideas of “normality” remain unspoken and implicit.2 In this way, discourse on normality behaves like other politicized discourses such as those of gender, (post)coloniality, nature, and so on. The conventionally powerful side of binaries such as culture/nature, human/animal, or normal/abnormal often can remain invisible, cloaked in familiarity, as the reputedly inferior, marked side (abnormal, animal) receives scrutiny and criticism

Abnormality · Aesthetics · Criticism · FREAK · Normality · Political science · Power (physics · Scrutiny · Sociology · Animal and Plant Science Education · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Psychology · Law · Philosophy · Social Psychology

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• The Incarceration of Wildness

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