Julia Pastrana, the “extraordinary lady”

Julia Pastrana was a Mexican woman whose “extraordinary” appearance led to her being displayed throughout Europe and America, first as a freak, then as a specimen. Recently, she was reburied in her birthplace. This essay considers the ways that Pastrana’s display both reinforces and challenges the lines between the self and other, human and non-human, ordinary and extraordinary that such spectacles rely upon. It further suggests how discursive systems, such as race, gender, normativity, and humanness intertwine in the social practices that constitute them. By analyzing how Pastrana’s display and recent repatriation and burial in Sinaloa invest her body with different meanings, this essay traces more complexly the processes that socially mark human bodies in order to reveal and explicate the inner workings of representational systems, such as race, gender, ethnicity, and disability.