People in Drawers: Finding Wonder in the Archives.

Abstract

This article discusses relics housed in the Ringling Circus Museum in Sarasota, Florida: photos, works of art, newspaper clippings, performance records, and scrapbooks of mostly 19th- and 20th-century circus performers with varied, often "unusual," bodies that have been all but forgotten. Encountering these artifacts left the author wonderstruck-a feeling sometimes so abrupt that it heaves us into the conscious presence of others-and left him with a string of complex emotions. In this article, the author attempts to recreate the affective experience of wonder as the performers' images were lifted before him, and to reflect on the ways disability prompts that affective experience of wonder and functions in moral development.