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When aerial performance became popular in the 20th century, critics reported the confusing gender appearance of its performers. Muscular women were described as mannish and Amazonian while men were observed to be graceful and feminine. I argue that aerial performance is an art form that allows gender to be reconstituted due to its unnatural and seemingly impossible stunts of flight and flexibility. Chapter Two details accounts of 20th century descriptions of aerial performance which reveal a constructed and unachievable version of femininity created to minimize women's influence in the worlds of circus and normal society. Chapter Three reviews literature of phenomenology and queer studies, relying heavily on the foundations by Merleau-Ponty, to theorize the audiences experience of intersubjectivity with aerial performers. The real presence of danger is kinesthetically transmitted to spectators which asks them to ponder questions of identity, mortality, and alternative movement in the world. Chapter Four provides examples of New Circus which demonstrate how modern artists capitalize on these unique visceral effects that aerial performance has on audience members to incite social change with their experimental work. New Circus asks audience members to find joy in discomfort as an entrance into the queer paradigm. It offers the potentiality and reiteration of bodies in space to suggest new modes of being, identity, and desire.
