Résumé :
When Fillis’ Circus reached Sydney in 1892 from southern Africa, there was official political intervention to ban Madame Jasia Scherazade from the lion act. Yet a female presenter in a small cage lion act had been an established role in England and Europe for nearly 50 years. Moreover, the athleticism of female circus performers was widely accepted in colonial Sydney and high-wire walker, Ella Zuila, rose to prominence in Sydney in 1872. This chapter compares Zuila’s and Jasia’s acts and weighs up whether the government’s official intervention was due to the perception of physical risk from animal attack or attributable to more complex moral concerns about the transgression of gender identity. It argues that in addition to the perceptions of physical risk during the performance and the risk of an accident during travel, there were social and political identity risks for female circus performers touring globally for economic gain. The transnational histories of Jasia and Zuila reveal that circus identities were emblematic of social complexity. In contrast to an aerial act that blurred the gender identity of a muscular acrobat such as Zuila, the lion act conveyed heightened impressions of masculine control over others, including animals, so that Jasia was confronting the premise of social and political control in white settler society.