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ABNORMALS, FREAKS, AND MICHAEL JACKSON: FOUCAULT, BALDWIN, AND
THE TRUTH OF THE GROTESQUE
Brad Elliott Stone
Loyola Marymount University
(bstone@lmu.edu)
Abstract: Anyone who watches the popular news from a Foucauldian
perspective is interested in the Michael Jackson case, given that Jackson is
famous for being the epitome of abnormality. In Abnormal, Foucault’s 1975-
1976 lecture course at the Collège de France, Foucault describes three kinds of
monsters—the hermaphrodite, the masturbator, and the incorrigible. Jackson fits
all three of these descriptions. The Jackson predicament was foretold by James
Baldwin, who wrote in the essay “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood”
that Jackson’s oddity would someday undo him, just as his own monstrosities
(being black and gay) worked against him. In this essay, I offer an interpretation
of the current Michael Jackson case from a Foucauldian and Baldwinian
standpoint.
Key Words: Michel Foucault, James Baldwin, racism, sexuality, abnormality
With the English publication of Abnormal, 1
Michel Foucault turns the tables once again.
In the previously published lectures, Society Must Be Defended (Il faut défendre la société), one
is left asking “Should society be defended?” (Faut-il deféndre la société?). In Abnormal,
Foucault explores the grotesque and shows that the truly grotesque is actually the way in which

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people understand abnormality. He explains how psychiatry is in its own way a monster, and has
gotten away with a pseudoscientific coup of the criminal court system.
Another thinker who is good at turning tables is James Baldwin. Although Baldwin’s
works have not yet been fully philosophically appropriated,2
his 1985 Playboy article “Freaks
and the American Ideal of Manhood”3
(sometimes anthologized as “Here Be Dragons”)
describes the hypocrisy of the American hatred of androgynous “freaks” who actually reveal the
truth about the defunct and false heterosexism (and racism) of American culture. By sharing
episodes from his years as a young writer in Greenwich Village, Baldwin reveals the grotesque
nature of gay-bashing and racism.
At the end of his essay, Baldwin turns his attention to Michael Jackson, who Baldwin
describes as “having turned so many tables,” a paradigm freak. In light of the recent Jackson
court case and the similarities between Baldwin and Foucault’s idea of the truth of the grotesque,
this paper offers a Foucauldian/Baldwinian understanding of “the Michael Jackson cacophony.”
This essay is divided into three parts. In the first section I discuss Foucault’s account of
the abnormals, focusing on the monster as the transgressor of the law, and the Ubuesque nature
of psychiatry. Using Foucault’s inversion of abnormality as a point of comparison, I turn to
Baldwin’s Playboy article in the second section, explicating Baldwin’s understanding of the
freak as a revealer of the truth and the grotesque attempt by others to silence that truth. The final
section turns to Michael Jackson, whose oddity is highlighted by Baldwin and fits into
Foucault’s description of the abnormal. I will make a few observations about the recent sodomy
case, and what Foucauldians/Baldwinians can think about in light of it.

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Abnormals
Foucault’s Abnormal lectures set up three distinct yet eventually interconnected
discursive objects that would make up the domain of the abnormal: the monster, the “individual
to be corrected,” and the masturbator. These three figures appear in one form or another in
Foucault’s published works. Since the masturbator appears in The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 in
basically the same manner as Foucault describes him in Abnormal, I will not focus on
masturbation here.4
Similarly, given that Foucault devotes much of Discipline and Punish to the
“individual to be corrected,” plus the little said by Foucault in the lectures about this circle of
abnormality, I will not spend too much time on incorrigibles. The monster, the figure on whom I
will focus in this section, appears in Abnormal in a way that it had not appeared in Foucault’s
oeuvre; although monsters are discussed in Madness and Civilization and The Order of Things,
they play a different role here.
Foucault tells us that the fascination and disgust with monsters morphs throughout the
ages. In the Medieval period, monstrosity was thought of mostly in terms of “the bestial man,”
the person who is half human and half animal, the by-product of the crossing of two kingdoms.
The Renaissance age puzzled over Siamese twins, and the Classical epistémè, steeped in its
organized tableaux, was unable to place the hermaphrodite. All of these variations or types of
monsters share the property of being strange “mixtures.” Foucault explains this idea of the
monster in the following way:
the monster is essentially a mixture . . . of two realms, the animal and the human:
the man with the head of an ox, the man with a bird’s feet—monsters. It is the
blending, the mixture of two species: the pig with a sheep’s head is a monster. It
is the mixture of two individuals: the person who has two heads and one body or

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two bodies and one head is a monster. It is the mixture of two sexes: the person
who is both male and female is a monster. It is a mixture of life and death: the
fetus born with a morphology that means it will not be able to live but that
nonetheless survives for some minutes or days is a monster. Finally, it is a
mixture of forms: the person who has neither arms nor legs, like a snake, is a
monster. (F 63)
Why are monsters a problem? The problem with monsters is that they defy our
categories of understanding, be they civil, scientific, or religious. This is why Foucault calls the
monster in his course summary of the 1974-1975 year an Antiphysis, one that is against nature (F
328). Monstrosity, Foucault tells us, “is the kind of natural irregularity that calls law into
question and disables it” (F 64). Like the madman in the Renaissance epistémè described in
Madness and Civilization, whose madness served as a testimony to the limits of human
knowledge, the monster shows the limits of natural, ecclesiastical, and civil law. To use a well-
established Foucauldian term, monsters are living transgressions: “the monster is the
transgression of natural limits, the transgression of classifications, of the table, and of the law as
table . . . there is monstrosity only when the confusion comes up against, overturns, or disturbs
civil, canon, or religious law” (F 63).
Foucault focuses on the hermaphrodite as the example par excellence of transgressive
being. As Foucault explains, the problem of hermaphrodites is several-fold: “one didn’t know
whether to treat [him/her] as a boy or a girl, whether or not he/she should be allowed to marry
and with whom, whether he/she could become the holder of an ecclesiastical living, whether
he/she could take religious orders, and so on” (F 65). It was such a problem that in the earlier
epistémès hermaphrodites were simply executed. Later on, however, hermaphrodites were

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forced to choose a gender and follow all of the civil, ecclesiastical, and moral rules applicable to
that gender. Regardless of this shift, the understanding of hermaphrodites as monsters remained.
In the Modern period, the understanding of monsters enters a new stage. In the new
arrangement of knowledge, “[m]onstrosity . . . is no longer the undue mixture of what should be
separated by nature. It is simply an irregularity, a slight deviation, but one that makes possible
something that really will be a monstrosity, that is to say, the monstrosity of character” (F 73).
Monsters are no longer natural transgressions; rather, they are criminals. It is important to
quickly note Foucault’s distinction between illegality and transgression. Illegality presupposes
the correctness of the law, whereas transgression puts law itself into question. In the later part of
the eighteenth century, Foucault tells us, “we see something emerge . . . the theme of the
monstrous nature of criminality, of a monstrosity that takes effect in the domain of conduct, of
criminality, and not in the domain of nature itself . . . the moral monster” (F 74-75).
Prior to the Modern epistémè, the criminal is understood as a kind of despot who wages
war against the sovereign (a theme that appears in Pt. I, Ch. 2 of Discipline and Punish),
becomes no longer a regicide but a kind of monster. As Foucault writes, “[e]very criminal could
well be a monster, just as previously it was possible that the monster was a criminal” (F 81-82).
Previously, monsters could be executed for being transgressors of natural law, and therefore a
committing an illegality “against the sovereignty of nature;” now, being a natural monster was
no longer a crime. The monstrosity being prosecuted in the Modern period is of a different sort.
Even in the case of Anne Grandjean, a hermaphrodite whose trial in 1765 signifies for Foucault a
turning point in the way hermaphrodites were understood as monsters, Champeaux, who
chronicled the trial, argues that Grandjean’s true monstrosity had nothing to do with being a

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hermaphrodite, but rather that as a woman (the gender she was “registered” under) she (not
“he/she” according to Champeaux) loved other women.
The rest of the story is deducible. As one finds in Discipline and Punish and Society
Must Be Defended, society must be defended from these kinds of monsters in a way that is much
more careful than when dealing with natural monsters. After all, one cannot immediately detect
a moral monster. It is only after the crime has taken place that one can, in hindsight, see the
signs of monstrosity, which therefore serve as the symptoms of monstrosity that are squelched
when they appear in others that follow. This is the problem of repeatability in Pt. II, Ch. 1 of
Discipline and Punish: crimes that are impossible to repeat do not require punishment.
Discipline, with its organization and surveillance, serves as the means of prevention in the hope
of reducing monstrous characteristics in the populace. It is this kind of worry about criminal
monstrosity that empowers psychiatry in the Modern epistémè, setting up the Ubu-esque nature
of judging characters instead of crimes.
Psychiatry is a juridico-medical pseudo-science whose claims “have the curious property
of being foreign to all . . . rules for the formation of scientific discourse, as well as being foreign
to the rules of law and of being, in the strict sense, grotesque” (F 11). If monstrosity can be
defined as being a strange, unnatural, transgressive mixture, then psychiatry, the industry
devoted to monstrosity, is itself a monster. Not quite science, not quite juridical; yet juridico-
scientific. This reveals what Foucault calls the Ubu-esque nature of psychiatry as a vehicle of
power: “it seems to me to be a way of giving a striking form of expression to the unavoidability,
the inevitability of power, which can function in its full rigor and at the extreme point of its
rationality even when in the hands of someone who is effectively discredited” (F 13). Psychiatry

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is the despicable facade of disciplinary power; this allows discipline as such to continue
unscathed.
The problem with psychiatry, Foucault argues, is that it is “the reactivation of an
essentially parental-puerile, parental-childish discourse . . . It is a childish discourse . . . a
discourse of fear whose function is to detect danger and to counter it” (F 35). Abnormals are
dangerous and scary, so the study of them is based in fear, not science. To show this
childishness, Foucault begins the lecture course with passages from two psychiatric reports,
neither of which are really scientific, for their descriptions are funny and clearly biased. These
reports, although funny, are frightening because “discourses of truth that provoke laughter and
have the institutional power to kill are, after all . . . discourses that deserve some attention” (F 6).
Given that the power to punish is contained in such infantile discourses based on fear, we have
reason to be concerned about psychiatric discourse and its affect on the way we understand
psychiatric power.5
As a result, psychiatric discourse is discounted through its own operation, which should
put into question the power that is granted it:
the psychiatric expert can only be Ubu himself. He can exercise the terrible
power he is asked to take on—which in the end is to determine, or to play a large
part in determining, an individual’s punishment—only through a childish
discourse that disqualifies him as scientist at the very moment he is appealed to as
a scientist, and through a discourse of fear, which makes him ridiculous as soon as
he speaks in court about someone accused of a crime . . . The scientist, who is
sheltered, protected, and even regarded as sacred by the entire institution and
sword of justice, speaks the language of children and the language of fear. (F 36)

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As a result, Foucault has turned the tables in Abnormal, showing the monstrosities of psychiatry,
the discourse whose task is to show the monstrosities of others. If it is indeed true that Il faut
défendre la société from monstrosities, perhaps psychiatry should be brought to an end.
Freaks
Baldwin’s description of freaks reiterates Foucault’s position about monsters and other
abnormals. Baldwin writes that “[f]reaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated—in
the main, abominably—because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our
most profound terrors and desires” (B 828). In other words, just as Foucault describes monsters
as strange bearers of truth, freaks reveal a terrible and terrifying truth about who we “normal
people” are. Like Foucault, Baldwin uses the hermaphrodite as an example. According to
Baldwin, the hermaphrodite reveals the fact that we are all androgynous, possessing both male
and female qualities:
the existence of the hermaphrodite reveals, in intimidating exaggeration, the truth
concerning every human being—which is why the hermaphrodite is called a
freak. The human being does not, in general, enjoy being intimidated by what
he/she finds in the mirror. The hermaphrodite, therefore, may make his/her living
in side shows or brothels, whereas the merely androgynous are running banks or
filling stations or maternity wards, churches, armies or countries. (B 814)
The hermaphrodite outwardly reveals our internal constitution. The hermaphrodite cannot hide
his/her androgyny in the way that we do. Therefore, the hermaphrodite is a freak; the fact that
he/she has some combination, internal and external, of both types of reproductive organs forces
us to see the limits of our classification of animals into “male” and “female,” forcing us to use

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the expression “he/she” as a kind of via tertia. This “he/she,” however, is actually not just a term
to describe the gendered being of the hermaphrodite; it is secretly our pronoun, too. It has to be
this way, Baldwin argues, for “love between a man and a woman, or love between any two
human beings, would not be possible did we not have available to us the spiritual resources of
both sexes” (ibid.). At the end of the article, Baldwin states it this way: “we are all androgynous,
not only because we are all born of a woman impregnated by the seed of a man but because each
of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other . . . We are part of each other. Many of my
countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often,
do I. But none of us can do anything about it” (B 828-829). In short, those we consider
monsters (especially those of “mixed” natures) reveal our own mixtures and monstrosities.
It is in light of the revelatory nature of freaks that Baldwin praises artists like Boy
George, who served as the poster-child for the “androgyny craze” of the 1980s, which Baldwin
considers “an attempt to be honest concerning one’s nature” (B 827). What is frightening, or to
use Foucault’s term, “grotesque,” is not the openly androgynous, but the ones who fight against
their androgyny by reinforcing what Baldwin calls “the American ideal of masculinity,” which
grounds America’s understanding of sexuality. This ideal is described as that which “created
cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch
and faggot, black and white” (B 815). Akin to Foucault, Baldwin describes such an ideal as
being “so paralytically infantile that it is virtually forbidden” (ibid.). Baldwin writes that
“figures as Boy George do not disturb me nearly so much as do those relentlessly hetero
(sexual?) keepers of the keys and seals, those who know what the world needs in the way of
order and who are ready and willing to supply that order” (B 827). In short, we should be more
afraid of George W. Bush, defender of world democracy and freedom against those who abuse

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and torture fellow human beings (under whose watch Iraqi prisoners of war were abused,
tortured, and humiliated by American soldiers – mixture! monstrosity!), than androgynous
people.
The majority of Baldwin’s article is autobiographical, like a lot of his writings tend to be.
Baldwin describes his teenage years as a monster. Baldwin was not any of the almost fantastical
creatures that Foucault discusses when describing monsters; Baldwin was a black man. People
treated Baldwin as if he were dangerous, a fact he considers odd: “I certainly had no desire to
harm anyone, nor did I understand how anyone could look at me and suppose me physically
capable of causing any harm. But boys and men chased me, saying I was a danger to their
sisters. I was thrown out of cafeterias and rooming houses because I was ‘bad’ for the
neighborhood” (B 819). To further demonstrate this point, Baldwin recalls his heterosexual
encounters. Given that there were no black women in the Greenwich Village that were interested
in him, Baldwin dated white women. The problem, however, was that white women really only
used him for his blackness. White women slept with him in order to scandalize their racist
parents (and were therefore racists themselves), which Baldwin describes in the following terms:
“more than one white girl had already made me know that her color was more powerful than my
dick . . . In short, I was black in that world, and I was used that way . . . I did not find it amusing,
in any way whatever, to act out the role of the darky” (B 824).
The gay world offered Baldwin a way out of the race trap.6
However, the American ideal
of masculinity, the same flight from androgyny that Baldwin believes makes America a
racialized place to live, placed him in another situation. In the gay scene, Baldwin learned that
“the male desire for a male roams everywhere” (B 821). Baldwin gives us a description of the
men he would encounter:

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These men, so far from being or resembling faggots, looked and sounded like the
vigilantes who banded together on weekends to beat faggots up . . . These men
looked like cops, football players, soldiers, sailors, Marines or bank presidents,
admen, boxers, construction workers; they had wives, mistresses and children. I
sometimes saw them in other settings . . . Sometimes they spoke to me, sometimes
not . . . But I had first seen them in the men’s room, sometimes on their knees,
peering up into the stalls, or standing at the urinal stroking themselves, staring at
another man, stroking, and with this miasma in their eyes. Sometimes,
eventually, inevitably, I would find myself in bed with one of these men, a
despairing and dreadful conjunction . . . (B 820-821)
The same men who would beat up openly gay people were the men that Baldwin often found
himself with. Baldwin shares this part of his life in order to show that the “faggot” is a monster
that reveals the inner desires of most men to experience sexual encounters with other men. Since
that fact cannot be openly acknowledged, anyone who seems to be open about it is a danger who
must be beaten up, even killed. Baldwin was dangerous in this capacity, for he was often
publicly called “faggot” and beaten up by the same men who in private wanted to have sex with
him. As Baldwin writes, “[w]hat was not clear at that time of my life was what motivated the
men and boys who mocked and chased me; for, if they found me when they were alone, they
spoke to me very differently . . . when they were alone, they spoke very gently and wanted me to
take them home and make love” (B 822).
It was not all negative, though. Baldwin describes how the gay scene allowed him “to
have got beyond the obscenity of color” (B 825), and therefore his overall experience in the
Village is positive in retrospect: “all of the American categories of male and female, straight or

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not, black or white, were shattered, thank heaven, very early in my life” (B 819). Being a freak
allowed him to see the truth of the grotesque nature of the American ideal of masculinity and the
whole sexualized racism that went with it. The freak is the inverse of the Foucauldian
psychiatrist; s/he sees the grotesque nature of the system that labels her/him as “grotesque.”
And, if we would let it happen, we could become free from the lie of “the ideal American life,” a
theme that Baldwin develops throughout his oeuvre.
Therefore, Baldwin, like Foucault, allows for the abnormal to serve as a revelation of a
truth that the rest of society flees from. Both thinkers reverse the labeling game, showing that
the truly grotesque is not the monster or the freak, but rather the society that craves the safety of
order and abhors dis-ease. The tables have been turned.
Michael Jackson
At the end of the “Freaks” article from 1985, Baldwin has the following to say about
Michael Jackson:
The Michael Jackson cacophony is fascinating in that it is not about Jackson at
all. I hope he has the good sense to know it and the good fortune to snatch his life
out of the jaws of a carnivorous success. He will not swiftly be forgiven for
having turned so many tables, for he damn sure grabbed the brass ring . . . All that
noise is about America, as the dishonest custodian of black life and wealth; and
blacks, especially males, in America; and the burning, buried American guilt; and
sex and sexual roles and sexual panic; money, success and despair . . . (B 828)
In light of the explorations made in this essay, anyone who follows the news from a Foucauldian
or Baldwinian point of view is interested in the Michael Jackson case, given that Jackson is the

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epitome of abnormality (Foucault) and one of the most interesting freaks in popular culture
(Baldwin). I will end this essay with some comments about the case.
It is interesting that Jackson is allegedly guilty of being all of the three types of
abnormals described by Foucault. First, Jackson is a monster in both the ancient and modern
senses. His nose and skin make him appear monstrous: he is black and white, gay and straight,
male and female; he is a gentle lover of children, yet sings songs of sex and violence. Also, if
the allegations are true, in the modern psychiatric sense, qua sexual predator, he is a monster
who preys upon young boys. Second, Jackson is a masturbator. He grabs his crotch while
dancing, which is clearly a masturbatory gesture, and, according to the 1993 allegations made
against him by a different boy, Jackson masturbates his victims and then requires that the victims
masturbate him. Finally, Jackson is incorrigible. The thrust of public concern stems from the
simple question, “Didn’t Michael learn anything from the 1993 allegations?” He still had boys
over to spend the night and sleep in the same room (sometimes in the same bed) with him. As a
result, Jackson is already “guilty” for being such an Antiphysis. He is guilty either way, either of
a crime or in the court of public opinion. His abnormality will count against him in a psychiatry-
driven court system where Jackson will not really be judged for his crime but for his monstrous
moral character, which is itself a crime waiting to happen.
As Baldwin predicted, race is also front and center in this trial. Jackson, who used to
think that it did not matter if one were black or white (as his song goes), in light of the
allegations has returned to the black world. In his January 14, 2004 Village Voice article “I
Believe I Can Open My Fly,” Richard Goldstein shows how R. Kelly, referred to in the article as
“the Pied Piper of R&B,” is unharmed from the allegations (21 counts) of child pornography,
including the statutory rape of a female minor, whereas Jackson suffers incredibly from fewer

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counts. The reason behind this discrepancy, Goldstein tells us, is in a racist heterosexist
depiction of black men:
Why does Jacko rate contempt while the Pied Piper gets a wink and a nod? The
answer lies in the widespread assumption that “awakening” a young lass is the
mark of a potent man. When combined with the racist fantasy that black men are
repositories of unbridled lust, sex with girls becomes the ultimate credential for a
playa. But Jacko will never qualify as a stud. He’s violated the rules of both
racial and gender identity by transforming himself into an alabaster androgyne . . .
If [Jacko] wants to save his career, he’ll have to start fooling around with 14-year-
old girls.7
Simply put, Michael Jackson has performed a “white” crime; black men are usually guilty of
statutory rape of young girls; Jackson is a sodomite who victimizes young boys. Race and
sexuality mix together in the Jackson case to monstrous consequences. Jackson is primarily a
monster because he breaks the “rules” of being black; in fact, he does more than that—he
transgresses them. Add the question of Jackson’s sexuality, which is always already
incorporated into the rules of race,8
and we have an even larger problem.
Which brings us to another monstrous mixture: the Nation of Islam and their attempt to
reestablish Jackson’s blackness. In his January 6, 2004 The Guardian article “Back into the
fold,” Gary Younge writes that this union of forces is odd. However, in its oddness, he writes, in
similar terms as Baldwin, the following:
Quite how a celebrity who has been in flight from his racial features, let alone his
racial identity, ended up in the arms of an organisation that is defined by race is a
moot point. Why a socially conservative institution committed to racial uplift

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should open its arms to a man charged with child molestation is similarly baffling.
At the heart of it, however, lies not just Jackson and the Nation [of Islam] but
three of America’s most intense obsessions after terrorism: race, crime and
celebrity.9
By aligning with the Nation of Islam, Jackson (oddly like O. J. Simpson) moves from one kind
of monster to another, a monster that is more tolerated than the sexual predator in American
society. To use Aaron McGruder’s The Boondocks from January 28, 2004, Michael Jackson is
entering a process of “re-negrofication.”10
Of course, these moves will not keep Michael Jackson from being a monster, given that
he will still be one as a black man if he “re-negrofies.” He cannot escape the grotesque because
he is part of a grotesque society; a society that is fascinated yet repulsed by monsters. Baldwin
and Foucault show us how this is possible, and why the case is interesting from a philosophical
point of view.
Notes
1
Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974-1975, ed. Valerio Marchetti and
Antonella Salomoni, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2003). All references to this text will be made
parenthetically as F followed by the page number.
2
This essay is the first of several essays I am working on that deal with Continental readings of the
literature of James Baldwin.
3
James Baldwin, “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood,” James Baldwin: Collected Essays, ed.
Toni Morrison (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1998). All references to this text will be made
parenthetically as B followed by the page number.
4
A whole volume of The History of Sexuality, called The Children’s Crusade, would have addressed the
masturbator in more detail.

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5
Cf. the 1973-1974 lecture course, Psychiatric Power (Le pouvoir psychiatrique).
6
Baldwin is not suggesting (and neither am I) that racism made him gay. He is rather making an
interesting contrast. In the heterosexual world, Baldwin was dangerous as a black man; in the gay world, Baldwin
was dangerous as a gay man. To give up one monstrosity was to take up another.
7
Richard Goldstein, “I Believe I Can Open My Fly,” The Village Voice, January 14-20, 2004 (Online
source: http://www.villiagevoice.com/issues/0402/goldstein.php, last accessed 26 Feb 2004).
8
Foucault deals with this issue in Pt. V. of The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 and Society Must Be Defended.
9
Gary Younge, “Back into the fold,” The Guardian, January 6, 2004 (Online source:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1116725,00.html, last accessed 26 Feb 2004).
10
Aaron McGruder, The Boondocks (comic strip), January 28, 2004.