"Up in the air": A feminist account of aerial performance as gendered edgework

This thesis focuses on the edgework experiences of women aerialists and the additional ontological risks they undertake when edgework is viewed as a gendered phenomenon. Edgework, as a theory of voluntary risk taking, focuses on boundary navigation and remaining in control, whilst getting as close to the ‘edge’ as possible without crossing it, for example life versus death. Edgework requires skills to navigate these boundaries, such as the ‘right stuff’ to navigate risks and ‘mental toughness’ when faced with chaos. However, in applying some of Judith Butler’s influential writings to the edgework literature and viewing women’s experiences through a Butlerian-informed lens, the theory of edgework becomes problematic, in that women’s experiences are stigmatized as deviant and/or are marginalized. To study these experiences, 22 semi-structured interviews were conducted with women aerialists, following a version of the biographical narrative interpretative method and a form of photo elicitation. Using thematic coding and analysis, the empirical findings of the study shed light on what makes aerial performance a form of edgework, with reference to the skills and capacities necessary for risk taking, and reveal aerial performance to be a form of gendered edgework, focusing on motivations and meanings. In connecting the findings with the literature, this thesis introduces three conceptual themes to explain some of the edgework experiences of the women aerialists: their ‘body conversations’ between one another, the tension between their ‘risky aesthetic’ and ‘aesthetic risk’, and how their aerial performing can be seen as a form of ‘edgy performativity’.