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In the circus, acrobats make powerful promoters of social values because audiences idealize them as models of human perfection. Despite an investment in maintaining hegemonic norms, Anglo-American circuses in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were places where acrobats performed in ways that did not reflect the gendered behavior that was held as appropriate in society at large. While surrounding narratives constructed acrobats as representative of an ideal humanity that could model the heights of human achievement, individual performers simultaneously resisted stereotypes of how women’s and men’s bodies should behave. Instead of conforming to prescribed categories, they displayed freedom from constraint.
This dissertation looks back through history to explore how ground-based acrobatic acts have expressed gender identity since the inception of the modern Anglo-American circus. Using case studies in four different time periods from the late-eighteenth century through the early twenty-first century, it examines performers and their acts in relation to contemporaneous cultural conceptions of gender. It reads acrobatic movement in the context of changing definitions of ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’ to reveal what appearance and deportment might have done to complicate mainstream definitions. It considers how physical virtuosity functions onstage, and how performers’ bodies have served as visual markers of identities, conforming to, pushing beyond, or challenging social norms. Acrobatic performances have long defied what is deemed ‘acceptable’ gendered behavior. Acrobatics carry the potential to destabilize sexist ideologies by using virtuosic physicality to subvert traditional identity categories and reinscribe repertoires of behavior.