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This studio-based research project explores ideas of gender performance through the digital manipulation of aerial acrobatics, resulting in a series of video works and installations. This paper explains the processes, artworks and conceptual developments of this project. Dubiously Wholesome’s focus on gender performance began as an interrogation of what it means to identify as female in contemporary society and how manifestations of gender are used to create an identity that interacts with the complexities of everyday life. An investigation into Judith Butler’s ideas of gender as a social performance instigated the project’s conceptual framework. This resulted in artworks that explore gender scripted from social repetition and then performed by the individual, whereupon the repetition works to validate gender signifiers and “instate” sex as naturalistic. The integration of aerial acrobatics into the project’s studio practice acted as both an aesthetic tool and a research methodology where my experience as a professional aerial performer informed my conceptual framework. The images created through this digital manipulation of aerial acrobatics were interspersed with fairytale imagery from Little Red Riding Hood and Rapunzel, drawing from the tales’ positions as social commentator and manipulator to subvert accepted views on gender roles. In my work, I used the idea of gender as performative and interpreted it, not through a text-based idea of script, but through an analogy of aerial performance. In this analogy, the red fabric I am suspended from came to represent the gender signifiers through which the body is bound by social constructions. The manipulation of the fabric around the body suggests the performativity of gender and that, like an aerial performance, gender is learned, rehearsed and performed. [author summary]