Rethinking the Political: Art, Work and the Body in the Contemporary Circus

Abstract

This dissertation is about the circus, but it is also about how we think through a range of possibilities for individual and social change in the contemporary post-Fordist or neoliberal moment. In the last 40 years geographers, along side other scholars, have documented an increasingly close relationship between social, political, and economic aspects of life in western countries. These shifts have raised concerns over shrinking spaces of resistance and loss of counter hegemonic voices, and increased interest in transgressive or ‘outside’ spaces and bodies as sites of resistance, escape, and social change. Two contested sites that seem to offer promise for resistance, yet are simultaneously critiqued for their participation in dominant discourses, are art (or creative labour) and the body. Despite prolific literatures on these topics in geography in the last decade, links between creative labour, theories of embodiment, and the living practices of cultural workers are still far too rare. To address this I examine the intersection of theories of research, labour, art, discipline, embodiment and politics, understood through the daily practices of circus performers doing highly physical and embodied work. I focus in particular on clowns and aerialists, performance forms to which I have outstanding access as a performer in these genres. I addition to extensive participant observation over several years of performance work, my research is based on 26 elite interviews with key performers in the Canadian circus community, and an ephemeral archive of visual and textual materials. The resonance of questions about the nature of social research, art and work, and disciplined and fluid subjectivities, opens up new space for thinking across often-disconnected spheres. I believe the presence of circus performers’ lived experiences and my own embodied knowledge throughout this analysis deepens our understanding of political possibilities across many different spaces.

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