The freak as a figure asserted itself since the 1960s, when it was used as a symbolic figure in the subcultures of the American youth. This meaning of the word, which overwrote the designation of deformed humans in circuses ("freak shows"), emerged in a context of a century already deeply disfigured by large-scale wars; in particular, the American youth felt dehumanized, alienated by the Vietnam War.

The human monster, in its very intimacy, is the subject of the sublime. Its aesthetic is based on its ugliness. Beyond a mere voyeurism, the freak's aesthetic twists the traditional codes, and its sexuality is the opportunity to represent the sexualities in a society that does not legitimate the diversity of its practices. Queer artists, in particular, used the freak as a figure of rhetoric to write about the margins of humanity. Originally, the creature of Frankenstein portrayed the very anxiety to be the only one of its kind; and the re-writings of the story, like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, stress in humorous ways the existential loneliness of the freak.

Yet, the sexuality of monsters is usually featuring a male monster with a female human being. Feminists today denounce such representations. Henceforth, some of them are bearing the figure of the witch as a symbol of emancipation. Others, like Virginie Despentes, claim a sexuality based on monstrousness: "I am rather King Kong than Kate Moss", she says. More broadly, freak sexualities converge with queer culture to assert a culture of otherness.

The strength of social divides, which nurture the emergence of freak figures, also have a considerable impact in xenophobic immigration policies. Foreigners are Space Invaders; and the English language, in particular, fuses under one name the immigrant and the extra-terrestrial being under the word 'alien', potentially denying the human dignity of the undocumented immigrant. By twisting its own stigmata, the alien in sci-fi or in comics developed itself in the pop culture, challenging what Jacques Rancière calls the distribution of the sensible.

Through these references, the figure of the freak represents simultaneously a political body as well as a body politic. Like a new norm, it re-generates the speeches and the stagings of abnormality. Even though the freak's speech is far from being unicolored, if its call for revolution is not shouted from a crystal-clear voice but rather by a tousled cacophony, one thing is for sure: the freak is among us.