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Article: Sex, Simians, and Spectacle in Nineteenth-Century France; Or, How to Tell a "Man" from a Monkey.
- Article from:
- Canadian Journal of History
- Article date:
- April 1, 1999
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1999 Canadian Journal of History. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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On March 16, 1825 the comic actor and dancer Mazurier launched a craze that swept western Europe and America.(1) Dressed in a monkey suit, he played the central character in a ballet called Jocko, le Singe du Bresil at the Theatre de la Porte-Saint-Martin in Paris.(2) Audiences everywhere were confounded by his simian-like antics and appearance. Was it a man or was it a monkey? Their reactions to Jocko were not unlike those of observers half a century later to Krao, a hirsute Laotian girl who was reputed to be an human-simian intermediary,. However, while Jocko and his imitators were representative of the "Good Monkey/Good Savage/Good Servant,"(3) Krao and other hirsute ...