Grotesque: Beauty
Disgusting! For some people, body humor is not considered to be in the realm of appropriate or polite behavior. The carnivale and humor of the grotesque in medieval Europe was considered “low,” of the earth, of genitals, bowels, sex, defecation and death. (Isack, pp 19-23) In this unofficial and unapproved behavior and language form, lay the power of shock, of owning and honoring (in a bizarre fashion) the peripheralized. Jo Anna Isaak, Feminism and Contemporary Art: the Revolutionary Power of Women’s Laughter, and Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, shed much light on the reasons why peripheralized populations of the present time may adopt “shocking” or “unofficial” speech forms in their vernacular and art forms.