WOMEN WHO FLY: AERIALISTS IN MODERNITY 

(1880-1930) 

 

by 

 

BIEKE GILS 

M.A., University of Windsor, 2009 

M.A., Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 2006 

 

A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF 

THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF 

 

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 

in 

THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES 

(Kinesiology) 

 

THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA 

(Vancouver) 

 

November 2013  

 

© Bieke Gils, 2013 



ii 

 

ABSTRACT 

 Around 1900, Charmion (alias Laverie Vallée) introduced a provocative ‘trapeze 

disrobing act,’ combined with feats of strength to her audiences in vaudeville theaters in New 

York. She was one of a wave of female aerialists whose performances quite literally ‘flew’ in the 

face of Victorian values. Trapeze artists in circuses and in vaudeville theaters, as well as stunt 

flying aviators showcasing their courage and abilities during local fairs or aerial exhibitions from 

the 1910s on, indeed pushed the boundaries of what was deemed possible in terms of the human 

body’s physical capacities while challenging traditional notions of gender, race, class, and 

sexuality through their unconventional performances.  

In this study I explore three cases of aerialists who navigated both the demands of 

managers/spectators for spectacular and titillating acts and their personal aspirations within the 

confines of the increasingly capitalist entertainment industries in the West between 1880 and 

1930. Besides Charmion, my study takes shape around the performances of “Barbette” or Vander 

Clyde who took Parisian theaters by storm with an amalgamation of trapeze artistry and female 

impersonation in interwar France; and Bessie Coleman, the first African American woman to 

gain a pilot license and to set up her own flying shows throughout the United States in the 1920s. 

For each case study I conducted exhaustive archival searches and analysed relevant newspaper 

articles, magazines, show reviews, photographs and silent film. 

I draw on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts of the carnivalesque and the grotesque, and on 

Victor Turner’s concept of liminality to illustrate how aerial performances between 1880 and 

1930 functioned as sites of creative resistance, opening up possibilities for a rethinking and 

redefinition of social categories of gender, race, class, and sexuality. I show how the 

performances of Charmion, Coleman and Barbette simultaneously reflected and challenged the 



iii 

 

anxieties and optimism of a society forced to revisit traditional beliefs regarding the 

gendered/racialized/classed/sexualized body. In demonstrating how these performers helped 

question modernizing beliefs regarding the human body’s capacities, and the female body’s 

physical abilities and appearance in particular, I argue they suggested new types of embodied 

agency for both women and men at the time.  

 

 

  



iv 

 

PREFACE 

 

A modified version of Chapter V has been published in Stadion in 2011. Bieke Gils. “‘The Only 

Race Aviatrix in the World’: A Tribute to Bessie Coleman (1892-1926),” Stadion 37 (2011): 55-

81. A modified version of Chapter III has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Sport 

History and will be published early on in 2014. Bieke Gils, “Flying, Flirting and Flexing,” 

Charmion’s Trapeze Act, Sexuality and Physical Culture at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” 

Journal of Sport History (2014).  

 

 



v 

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS 

ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................................... ii 

PREFACE ........................................................................................................................................ iv 
TABLE OF CONTENTS ......................................................................................................................v 
LIST OF IMAGES ............................................................................................................................ vii 
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ............................................................................................................. viii 
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .................................................................................................................. ix 

DEDICATION ....................................................................................................................................x 

 

Chapter I: Women Who Fly .........................................................................................................1 
Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 1 
Destabilizing Categories ............................................................................................................. 7 

Contextualizing the Case Studies .............................................................................................. 10 
Thesis Structure ........................................................................................................................ 21 

 

Chapter II: Framing and Tracing the Aerial Body ..................................................................24 
Framing ..................................................................................................................................... 24 

Introducing Bakhtin .............................................................................................................. 24 
Carnival and the Carnivalesque ....................................................................................... 27 

The Grotesque Body .......................................................................................................... 29 
Bakhtin and the Omission of Women’s Voices ................................................................. 34 

Victor Turner and Liminality ................................................................................................ 39 
Bakhtin, Turner, and Agency ................................................................................................ 42 

Tracing ...................................................................................................................................... 46 

Reconstructing the Aerial Body ............................................................................................ 50 

Biographical Case Studies ................................................................................................ 52 
Sources/Traces .................................................................................................................. 54 

Searching for Charmion, Barbette, and Bessie Coleman ...................................................... 57 

Searching for Charmion ................................................................................................... 58 
Bringing Barbette to Light/Life ......................................................................................... 61 

Commemorating Coleman ................................................................................................ 63 

 

Chapter III: Flying, Flirting and Flexing: Charmion’s Trapeze Act, Sexuality, and Physical 

Culture at the Turn of the Twentieth Century .........................................................................66 
Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 66 
From Unabashed Burlesque to Respectable Vaudeville ........................................................... 70 
Charmion the Parisian Sensation .............................................................................................. 74 

A Woman with the Muscles of Sandow ................................................................................... 80 
To View and Be Viewed ........................................................................................................... 86 

Swinging Between Freedom and Constraint ............................................................................. 92 

 

 

 



vi 

 

Chapter IV: Le Numéro Barbette: Destabilizing Gender on the High Wire, the Rings and 

the Flying Trapeze .......................................................................................................................94 
Barbette Beginnings .................................................................................................................. 97 
Paris Was the Experience… .................................................................................................... 102 

Des Gens Ne Voient Dans les Spectacles Que Ce Qu’ils Sont ............................................... 103 
Their Love-life is Even Sadder… ........................................................................................... 107 
Une Eve Future ....................................................................................................................... 110 
Un Hommage à La Femme ..................................................................................................... 113 
Life after 1938 ......................................................................................................................... 117 

 

Chapter V: Bessie Coleman: “The Only Race Aviatrix in the World” ................................121 
Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 121 
The Winged Gospel’s Female Missionaries ........................................................................... 126 

Dreams of Flight ..................................................................................................................... 132 
On a Mission to France ........................................................................................................... 137 

Missionary, Entrepreneur, Entertainer .................................................................................... 141 
The Sky is the Limit for Queen Bess ...................................................................................... 151 

Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 155 

 

Chapter VI: Conclusion ............................................................................................................157 
Contributions ........................................................................................................................... 165 
Future Research ...................................................................................................................... 166 

 

Bibliography ...............................................................................................................................174 

 

 

  



vii 

 

LIST OF IMAGES 

 

Image 1: Charmion with feathered hat and fancy dress on the trapeze. Courtesy of the Billy Rose 

Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and 

Tilden Foundations. ...................................................................................................................... 70 

 

Image 2: Charmion flexing her right bicep. Courtesy of the Billy Rose Theatre Division, The 

New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. ........ 82 
 

Image 3: Charmion posing provocatively without corset, circa 1898. Courtesy of the Billy Rose 

Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and 

Tilden Foundations. ...................................................................................................................... 84 

 

Image 4: Barbette prepares for his act. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. ..... 101 

 

Image 5: Bessie Coleman’s French pilot license. Courtesy of the National Air and Space 

Museum, Smithsonian Institution. .............................................................................................. 140 

 

Image 6: Bessie Coleman on the wheel of a Curtiss JN-4 “Jennie” circa 1924. Courtesy of the 

National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution. ........................................................ 151 
 

 

 

 



viii 

 

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS 

 

FAI:   Féderation Aéronautique Internationale 

BNF:   Bibliothèque Nationale de France 

UBC:   University of British Columbia 

WASP: Women Airforce Service Pilots 



ix 

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

This dissertation would not have been written if it was not for the help and support of 

many great individuals. I would like to express my sincere thanks to my supervisor, Patricia 

Vertinsky, whose guidance and dedication have been invaluable to the development of my 

research skills, critical thinking and confidence. I am also indebted to my committee members, 

Mona Gleason and Wendy Frisby for their excellent and constructive feedback on my writing 

and their support during the dissertation process. I am grateful for David Chapman’s guidance in 

pointing the way to source materials and his help interpreting them. Many thanks go to Fred 

Hume whose kind support and interest in my work in its early stages helped me gain confidence 

in my research project. Special thanks also go to my colleagues and close friends, Cathy Mills, 

Catherine Shankweiler, Marleen de Ruiter and Donna Lee whose astute advice on my work have 

been critical in my personal and professional development. I am greatly indebted to my partner 

Alexander Westbye whose encouragements and endless patience inspired me to finish this 

dissertation. I also wish to thank my close friends Nicole Ong, Iris Geenen, Gabriella Espino, 

Andrée Gacoin, Matt Dixon, Andrew Hill, Fred Vermote, Sotonye Godwin-Hart, Inge Derom, 

Jan Mertens, Rumana Monzur, Sarah Meli, Guillaume Lefèbvre, Abhijit Pandhari, Harrison 

Inefuku and Jiyoung Suh for their enduring moral support and for luring me away from my 

books to renew my energy. Last, but not least, the biggest ‘thank you’ goes to my parents, Bie 

and Hans, and my sisters, Sarah and Tinne, who have always unconditionally supported and 

encouraged my endeavours far away from home.  

 

  



x 

 

DEDICATION 

 

To my parents and sisters  

who encouraged me to spread my wings and take off 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



1 

 

Chapter I: Women Who Fly 

Introduction 

On December 25, 1897, Laverie Vallée, better known by her stage name Charmion, made 

her debut in Koster and Bial’s vaudeville theater in New York City with a provocative 

undressing act on the trapeze. “A crowded house was present and nothing but the sensation 

which Charmion was expected to make was talked about,” a reporter of the New York Dramatic 

Mirror wrote. He continued: 

It had been whispered around that her act would be startling, and the photographs 

exhibited in the lobby seemed to give color to the rumor. When her number was 

put up the house was darkened, and opera glasses were put into use. Max 

Gabriel’s band struck up “On Broadway,” and a pretty woman walked out from 

the wings dressed in the latest fashion. With a Frenchy shrug of the shoulders she 

climbed the ladder and stepped into the net. A few steps brought her to the rope 

by which she was hoisted on the trapeze. She then attempted one or two tricks, but 

seemed to find her clothes a bother, so she began to unhook her waist. When she 

began to take it off she exhibited all the shyness of a timid girl. Finally the waist 

came off. Then she hung by her feet, and the skirts, etc., naturally fell down over 

her head, leaving a view of lace unmentionables, black stockings, purple garters, 

and a large amount of pink silk fleshing between the garters and her hips. This 

part of the exhibition was received with a mixture of laughter, applause and 

hisses. The next move was to stand on the trapeze and loosen the hampering 

skirts, unmentionables, etc., which were dropped in a bunch to the net below. She 

was then clad in a chemise, which she removed while hanging head downward. 

Then she sat on the trapeze and removed her buttoned shoes, garters and 

stockings. Her large hat was then thrown aside, and she was revealed in 

conventional costume of the female acrobat. Her work from this point on was 

certainly excellent, and she was applauded frequently.
1
 

 

Charmion was just one of a large number of aerialists around the turn of the twentieth 

century whose performances evoked both praise and criticism among audiences, critics, and 

moral reformers because they quite literally “flew in the face of Victorian values.”
2
 Indeed, 

                                                 
1
 New York Dramatic Mirror, December 25, 1897, 18.  

2
 Andrew L. Erdman, Blue Vaudeville: Sex, Morals and the Mass Marketing of Amusement, 1895–1915 (Jefferson, 

NC: McFarland & Co., 2004), 9, 115. Though the notion of ‘aerialists’ in its broadest definition may include various 

types of performers whose acts have aerial action in common, like ballooning, parachuting and even ski-jumping or 



2 

 

aerial acts by muscular women like Charmion were daring and hence questionable in light of 

both medical and popular views of the female body as passive, weak, nervous, and destined 

primarily to bear and raise children. Like many other female aerialists at the time, Charmion 

destabilized traditional notions of gender and femininity through aerial action. Trapeze artists in 

circuses and in vaudeville theaters, as well as stunt flying aviators showcasing their courage and 

abilities during local fairs or aerial exhibitions from the 1910s on, indeed pushed the boundaries 

of what was deemed possible in terms of the human body’s physical capacities while challenging 

traditional notions of gender, race, class and sexuality through their provocative and 

unconventional performances.  

In this study I explore individuals like Charmion, who navigated both the demands of 

managers/spectators for spectacular and titillating acts and their personal needs and aspirations 

within the confines of the increasingly capitalist entertainment industries in North America and 

Europe between 1880 and 1930. Besides Charmion, my study is shaped around the performances 

of American born “Barbette” or Vander Clyde (1904–1973),
3
 who took Parisian theaters and 

circuses by storm with a clever amalgamation of trapeze artistry and female impersonation in 

interwar France, as well as aviator Elisabeth, or “Bessie” Coleman (1892–1926), the first African 

American woman to gain a pilot license and to set up her own flying shows throughout the 

United States in the 1920s.  

In some respects the grouping of these performers in my study can be viewed as a 

‘collective biography.’ As Cowman points out, collective biographies usually focus on 

individuals who are involved in/affected by similar structures, networks and ideologies, or who 

                                                                                                                                                             
diving for example, in this study I focus on aerialists who performed on the trapeze or flew airplanes between 1880 

and 1930 in North American and European contexts. 
3
 Controversy exists about his exact year of birth. Several sources quote 1899 instead of 1904.  



3 

 

are connected through family relations, métier, and/or politics. The individuals in my study were 

certainly affected by similar structures and bodily ideologies and were “linked by a theme rather 

than intertwined through deep personal connections.”
4
 Indeed, it is unlikely that the individuals 

in my study ever met each other, but they did share a common interest (theme) in aerial 

performance.  

Charmion, Barbette, and Coleman are three examples of performers who took advantage 

of the opportunities offered by the booming entertainment industries in the United States and 

Europe between 1880 and 1930. Industrialisation at the end of the nineteenth century, 

accompanied by a rise in urbanisation and overall leisure time, had contributed to a growing 

demand for, and consequent expansion and commercialization of entertainment in many cities in 

the West. Circuses, theaters, music halls, casinos, and nickelodeon movie houses proliferated, 

providing the swelling group of male and female consumers with a series of new forms of cheap 

leisure and entertainment.
5
 Such forms also provided new employment opportunities for aspiring 

dancers, singers, comedians, acrobats and aerialists like Charmion, Barbette, and Coleman.  

The life stories and careers of these three performers were different and unique, but also 

had much in common. As previously mentioned, they shared an interest in aerial activities and, 

each in their own ways, destabilized traditional notions regarding the gendered, racialized, 

classed, and sexualized body through their daring and provocative performances that involved 

the artful and skillful combination of technology (flying through the air on a trapeze or in an 

airplane) and the body. Barbette, Coleman and Charmion were performers who engaged in 

different forms of aerial acrobatics: Charmion displayed her physical prowess on the static 

                                                 
4
 Krista Cowman, “Collective Biography,” in Research Methods for History, ed. Simon Gunn and Lucy Faire 

(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 91.  
5
 Kathy Peiss, “Going Public: Women in Nineteenth-Century Cultural History,” American Literary History 3 (4) 

(1991): 824.  



4 

 

trapeze; Barbette engaged in tight rope walking and aerial tricks on the flying rings and flying 

trapeze; while Coleman executed stunts like loops, figure eights and parachute jumps with/from 

her airplane.  

Much of these performers’ popularity stemmed from their ability to combine femininity 

with physical prowess, technical skill, and risk.
6
 The dangerous nature of aerial performances 

was certainly one reason for aerialists’ popularity among entertainment managers and spectators, 

and fatalities were not uncommon. Both trapeze and airplane accidents occurred frequently and 

many aerialists in fact died during their performances. Stunt flyer Bessie Coleman for example, 

died in an airplane accident in 1926. Lillian Leitzel, headline trapeze performer for the Ringling 

Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus in the 1910s, died when she fell from a height in 1931. 

To survive in the physically demanding and financially competitive atmospheres of their 

trades, Charmion, Barbette, and Bessie Coleman also had to be business-minded and 

entrepreneurial. They had to be innovative in their performances and preferably be the first to 

execute tricks and stunts to be successful. They were relatively independent in their endeavours 

and had to play their cards well to gain financial support to keep their businesses (and 

themselves) alive.  

The trades of these performers also required them to be extremely mobile geographically. 

They travelled to various places in the world in pursuit of the most lucrative contracts and never 

                                                 
6
 An early and historically significant example of the uproar women’s aerial performances could cause was the death 

of tightrope walker Selina Powell in 1863 in Ashton Park, Birmingham, England. Powell, according to the reporter 

in the Miner and Workman’s Advocate, was six months pregnant when she fell when the rope collapsed on which 

she was walking blindfolded. Her death, Assael notes, sparked a nationwide outcry against “dangerous 

performances” and unleashed debates between moral reformers, who were opposed to dangerous and unrespectable 

performances like that of Powell, and managers and artists who supported “free trade and fair play.”
6
 In England, 

such accidents paved the way for the Dangerous Performance Act in 1879, targeted at children under the age of 

fourteen and women engaged in certain kinds of gymnastics and high-wire acts in circuses and theaters. See the 

Miner and Workman’s Advocate, “Shocking Death of the Female Blondin,” July 25, 1863; Brenda Assael, The 

Circus and Victorian Society (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2005), 108; Helen Stoddart, 

Rings of Desire: Circus History and Representation (UK: Manchester University Press, 2000), 172. 



5 

 

remained in the same place for a long time. Though it was necessary for aerial performers to 

travel extensively, it also gave their profession a free and hedonistic allure, as Le Roux and 

Garnier pointed out in 1890: 

Earth contains no guests more free than these [wo]men… Lords of their own will 

and time, they obey no laws except the terms of their voluntary engagements. 

They fly from war, pestilencae, and ruin. When the heavens darken, they strap up 

their trunks, go on board a steamer and journey to other countries where gaiety 

and gold are to be found.”
7
  

 

The idea of travelling performers embodying an ideal of freedom can also be found in 

Brown’s conceptualization of Charles Baudelaire’s ‘flâneur.’
8
 Baudelaire’s flâneur originally 

referred to the well-to-do male city dweller who strolled in the city to both see and be seen, while 

staying anonymous amongst the moving crowds of people. “The flaneur,” Small notes, “was an 

urban observer whose eyes and feet were mobilized in the delineated spaces of the city to take in 

the expressions of contemporaneity around him. He was typically male, of the middle class, and 

inevitably white.”
9
 Although this flâneur mentality, associated with a seemingly new kind of 

urban freedom and mobility in modernity, is not generally associated with women, it does 

provide one useful way of describing female performers’ presence in the city at the end of the 

nineteenth and early twentieth century.
10

 The notion of the “female flâneur” can be seen in the 

existence of the performer as a traveler or ‘drifter,’ going from city to city, country to country to 

perform. Aerialists like Charmion, Bessie Coleman, and Barbette indeed seemed to go wherever 

they pleased and embodied a kind of freedom out or reach of most women, and even men, at the 

                                                 
7
 Hugues Le Roux and Jules Garnier, Acrobats and Mountebanks (translated from French by A.P. Morton) (London: 

Chapman and Hall, Limited, 1890), 3. 
8
Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Durham, NC: Duke 

University Press, 2008), 17.  
9
 James Smalls, “ “Race” As Spectacle in Late Nineteenth-Century French Art and Popular Culture,” French 

Historical Studies 26 (2) (2003): 355.  
10

 See also Janet Wolff, “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity,” Theory, Culture and 

Society 2 (3) (1985): 37-46.  



6 

 

time. All three performers travelled throughout the United States and Europe and their 

flamboyant personalities - in the case of Charmion and Barbette evidenced by glamorous 

pictures and movies - gave them the free and hedonistic allure Le Roux and Garnier wrote about.    

In reality, this appearance of freedom was sustained by misconception, and the actual 

freedom of aerial performers had its limits. To view aerialists as fantastic performers who defied 

all scientific and social laws to embody ultimate freedom and emancipation, was to ignore the 

many hours of training and dedication their performances required. Indeed, the aerial body was 

in most cases a well-rehearsed one. Assael points out, on the one hand, that the female aerialist 

was “emblematic of nineteenth-century individualism, liberated from the industrial world of the 

machine, particular and irreplaceable.”
11

 In addition, as noted earlier, aerialists not only 

possessed unique physical prowess, they were also business-minded, a requirement to survive in 

the hard and competitive entertainment circuit. On the other hand, Assael notes that their 

seemingly liberated bodies were dependent on new technologies, and that they had to adhere to a 

strict discipline in rehearsal, performance, and business-related tasks like securing and 

maintaining engagements. Aerialists thus contributed to a “perfect assembly line of production.” 

While on the surface they may have appeared unique and autonomous, in reality they were also 

disciplined and part of an organic whole.
12

 Similarly, in the context of circus Stoddart points out: 

There is … a congruence between the presentation of the female aerialist’s body 

and the image that the circus as a whole has presented of itself. … the circus … 

promotes an idea of itself in the popular imagination as embodying a lifestyle 

unfettered by conventionality or by social and legal restraint; a freedom which was 

echoed in performances which foregrounded the illusion of ease. Behind the image 

lie levels of physical discipline, bodily regulation and hardship which are unrivalled 

by any other western performance art.
13

 

                                                 
11

 Assael, The Circus and Victorian Society, 7.  
12

 Ibid., 5.   
13

 Stoddart, Rings of Desire, 175.  



7 

 

Destabilizing Categories 

Associations of aerial performers with unrestricted freedoms were also a function of their 

seeming ability to blur social categories of gender, race, class and sexuality. By 1931, French 

screenwriter Pierre Bost had already noted that the identities of aerialists were becoming 

indistinct and seemingly suspended while in the air. Having watched a performance of flying 

trapeze artists, he wrote:  

… l’éloignement même des voltigeurs, sous la coupole du cirque, au-delà du 

filet, contribue à les isoler comme dans un autre monde, ou ils développent leur 

puissance librement, on dirait presque sans s’occuper du public. Nous 

distinguons mal leurs visages; l’étroitesse de la plate-forme ou ils se posent, ne 

leur permet pas les saluts et révérences; est c’est toujours de très bas que leur 

arrivent les applaudissements.
14

 

 

… the distance of aerialists, under the big circus top and above the net, isolates 

them as if in a different world, where they develop their power freely, one could 

say almost without taking note of the audience. We cannot distinguish their faces 

very well; the narrowness of the platform where they stand, does not allow for 

salutations and bows; and it is always very far down that that applause is given.
15

 

 

The view that aerialists performed ‘in a different world’ and that their gender identities seemed 

to fade while in the air has been more recently elaborated on by aerial historians Peta Tait and 

Helen Stoddart. According to Tait, the female aerialist at the turn of the twentieth century 

“transgressed the fixed order of gender behavior imposed on social bodies.” While destabilizing 

limits to the actions and movements of the physical body, she also “rearranged cultural 

categories of the feminine body.”
16

 Similarly, Helen Stoddart writes that “[t]he aerialist 

constructs and operates within a fantasy space in which the body is at once made insubstantial 

and unclassifiable and is thereby liberated from the limitations normally attached to bodies 

                                                 
14

 Pierre Bost, Le Cirque et le Music-Hall (Paris: Au Sans Pareil, 1931), 124.  
15

 Author’s own translation. 
16

 Peta Tait, “Feminine Free Fall: A Fantasy of Freedom,” Theatre Journal 48 (1996): 30.  



8 

 

physically marked out in terms of their gender or race.”
17

 In other words, “the success of aerial 

performance was a response to a social desire for a physical state which falls away from social 

categories.”
18

 

The view that aerial performances were capable of rendering traditional social and 

physical categories of the body temporarily insignificant and/or indistinguishable is also at the 

core of my analyses of Barbette, Charmion, and Coleman. To add more depth to my case studies, 

I draw on Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1895–1975) concepts of the carnivalesque and the grotesque and 

on the liminality concept of Victor Turner (1920–1983), in order to examine how aerial 

performances functioned as sites of creative resistance, opening up possibilities for a rethinking 

and redefinition of social categories of gender, race, class, and sexuality. In my study, I argue 

that the festive carnivalesque or liminal atmosphere, generally associated with circuses, 

vaudeville theatres, and airplane exhibition grounds, softened the provocative and risky nature of 

aerial performances and provided aerialists platforms from which they could challenge social 

categories without too much criticism. Following Bakhtin and circus historian Bouissac, my 

argument is based on the notion that popular entertainment between 1880 and 1930 was central 

to an interrogation of discourses regarding the gendered/sexualized/racialized/classed body and 

its (physical) abilities. While aerial performances, at first sight, may have seemed “socially 

peripheral” because of their associations with magic and fantasy, I suggest that they were in fact 

at the heart of North American and European culture and society between 1880 and 1930.
19

   

                                                 
17

 Stoddart, Rings of Desire, 175.  
18

 Tait, “Feminine Free Fall,” 34. 
19

 Paul Bouissac, Circus and Culture. A Semiotic Approach (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 

1976), 9; Peter Stallybrass, and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University 

Press, 1986), 5.  



9 

 

Aerial performers like Charmion, Barbette, and Coleman created a spectrum of possible 

interpretations in terms of the abilities of women, decency, sexuality, and so on. Each of them 

defied gravity in spectacular ways which also seemed to suspend restrictive social 

categorizations. Female trapeze acrobats like Charmion were as muscular as some of their male 

counterparts, yet presented themselves as feminine in tights and revealing costumes. Female 

aviators like Coleman wore manly leather flying jackets with flying cap and goggles covering 

their hair, masking gendered and racialized categories of the body. Female impersonator 

Barbette quite literally ‘flew in-between’ genders, playing with categories of feminine grace and 

male muscularity. More generally, flying speed, when combined with the distance between aerial 

performers and their audiences, smoothed out gendered and racial physical characteristics, 

making the aerial body seem unreal and non-human.  

 The view of the aerial body as ‘non-human’ oscillated between superhuman and freakish 

or grotesque. This was also a point where meanings associated with the female and male aerialist 

seemed to diverge. Muscular and virile male aerialists, including trapeze flyers and aviators, 

were often described by bird- and god-like metaphors, perceived as real-life demonstrations of 

scientific progress, and even notions of Darwinian evolution.
20

 While the female aerial body was 

not devoid of associations pertaining to progress, it was certainly read in different ways. On the 

one hand, female aerialists embodied the ideal, perfectly fit, and healthy looking ‘New 

Woman’
21

 and an example of what all women should strive for. Indeed, physically strong trapeze 

artists like Charmion, for example, were able to justify their unusual competence and muscular 

                                                 
20

 Peta Tait, Circus Bodies. Cultural Identity in Aerial Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 3; 

See also Jane R. Goodall, Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin (London and New York: Routledge, 

2002).  
21

 See Janet M. Davis, Culture and Society Under the American Big Top. The Circus Age (Chapel Hill and London: 

The University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 82-3.  

http://webcat2.library.ubc.ca/vwebv/search?searchArg=Circus%20bodies&searchCode=TALL&searchType=1


10 

 

build in light of the increasing popularity of gymnastic schools for “ladies and girls”
22 

and the 

‘physical culture craze’ in North America and Europe.
23

 Towards the end of the nineteenth 

century an increasing number of women were practicing gymnastics and engaging in sport 

activities.
24

 Yet, while functioning as role-models, female aerialists seemed ambiguous and 

threatening because they transgressed and confused traditional notions of the female body. They 

appeared both “available and resistant” to the impositions of social categories of gender and 

femininity,
25

 and thus literally ‘flew in-between’ strict social prescriptions regarding the active 

female body.      

 

Contextualizing the Case Studies 

Events at the turn of the twentieth century offer a rich arena and a fertile starting point for 

my analyses of the aerial performances of Barbette, Coleman, and Charmion. These performers 

operated in different socio-geographical contexts and time frames and each represented different 

aspects of a modernizing era. The booming entertainment industries, with the performing body at 

their center, were emblematic of the social and cultural shifts that characterized American and 

European societies at the time. Indeed, as Vertinsky points out, “[i]n the leap from the nineteenth 

                                                 
22

 Assael, The Circus and Victorian Society, 135. Emphasis hers; “Muscular womanliness,” Tait writes, “had to be 

framed in ways that acknowledged impressive physiques while avoiding any obvious implication for transforming 

everyday relationships.” See Tait, Circus Bodies, 34. 
23

 See for example Michael Anton Budd, The Sculpture Machine. Physical Culture and Body Politics in the Age of 

Empire (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Press LTD, 1997); David L. Chapman, Sandow the 

Magnificent: Eugen Sandow and the Beginnings of Bodybuilding (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994). 
24

 Susanna Hedenborg and Gertrud Pfister, “Ecuyères and “Doing Gender.” Presenting Femininity in a Male 

Domain – Female Circus Riders 1800-1920,” Scandinavian Sport Studies Forum 3 (2012), 34. 
25

 Tait, “Feminine Free Fall,” 33.  



11 

 

to the twentieth century bodily practices were a potent barometer of cultural transition…”
26

 The 

aerial body especially seemed to reflect much of the anxieties of these societies in transition.  

As Showalter indicates, the turn of the twentieth century, often referred to as the onset of 

a modern époque or ‘modernity,’
27

 was a socially and culturally turbulent period, full of both 

social optimism and anxieties about the potential crumbling of traditional values pertaining to 

race, class, gender, and sexuality.
28

 Moreover, an increased emphasis on scientific 

rationalization, new inventions like electricity, automobile, airplane, cinema, etc., and an 

apparent desire for more ‘liberated’ and eclectic forms of art, music, and fashion were 

representative of this “complex passage from Victorian culture to modernism.”
29

  

Profound changes around the turn of the twentieth century stemmed (among others 

things) from shifting definitions of what it meant to be a woman or man. Long-held beliefs about 

what constituted appropriate female and male sexual identity and behaviour started to falter. The 

terms ‘feminism’ and ‘homosexuality’ were coined at this time and definitions of what and who 

was considered sexually deviant (e.g., strippers, prostitutes) gave rise to a number of purity 

campaigns and increased restrictive legislations and censorship.
30

 The turn of the twentieth 

century was perceived of as a period out of control: a time of anarchy and profound cultural 

                                                 
26

 Patricia Vertinsky, “Ida Rubinstein: Dancing Decadence and the ‘Art of the Beautiful Pose,’ ” Nashim: A Journal 

of Jewish Women's Studies & Gender Issues (forthcoming).  
27

 Though, as Wolff points out, any attempt to date the onset of modernity is arbitrary, the modern period is typically 

defined in terms of accelerated urbanization and transformations in work, housing and social relations brought about 

by the rise of industrial capitalism. Wolff, “The Invisible Flâneuse,” 38.    
28

 Elaine Showalter,  e  a  Anarch    ender and    t re at the  in de  i c e (New York: Viking, 1990), 2. 
29

 Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements. Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of- the-Century New York (Philadelphia, 

NY: Temple University Press, 1986), 6.   
30

 See also John H. Houchin, Censorship of the American Theatre in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, UK: 

Cambridge University Press, 2003).  



12 

 

insecurity. Not surprisingly, these social uncertainties intensified a desperate longing for control 

over everything that seemed to destabilize familiar cultural values and beliefs.
31

   

A particular need for control was manifested around the issues of sexuality and gender. 

According to Foucault, ‘sex’ became an object of regulation and control. Rooted in eighteenth 

century Christianity that “tended to make the flesh into the root of all evil,”
32

 the turn of the 

twentieth century invested the body with scientific and medicalized discourses that attempted to 

regulate and control appropriate sexual behaviour for men, and especially for women. Sex and 

sexuality no longer referred solely to male and female biological characteristics, they had 

become cultural constructions, powerful discursive tools.
33

 As Smith-Rosenberg notes, the turn 

of the twentieth century was a “golden age of scientific determinism, of social Darwinism and 

eugenics.”
34

 Indeed, not only did sex and gender become objects of scientific scrutiny and 

regulation, racial differences too were now explained in terms of ‘scientifically proven’ white 

supremacy notions by the eugenics movement. In scientists’ search for control and attempts to 

establish the boundaries of ‘normal’ human sexual behaviour, sexuality became an object of 

intense study and classification. These scientists or ‘sexologists,’ Smith-Rosenberg explains, 

organized “specific sexual acts, fantasies, fetishes, sensations” according to taxonomies that 

helped them chart degrees of abnormality and perversion.
35

   

The body was believed to be a closed energy system and women especially were warned 

to be careful not to waste this energy on intellectual labour and physical activity. According to 

                                                 
31

 Showalter, Sexual Anarchy 3, 4.  
32

 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage 

Books Random House, 1980), 19. 
33

 Ibid., 11.  
34

 See Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: A.A. 

Knopf, 1985), 267. See also Patricia Vertinksy, The Eternally Wounded Woman: Women, Doctors, and Exercise in 

the Late Nineteenth Century (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994).  
35

 Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct, 267-68. 

http://webcat1.library.ubc.ca/vwebv/search?searchArg=Smith-Rosenberg,%20Carroll.&searchCode=NAME&searchType=4
http://webcat1.library.ubc.ca/vwebv/search?searchArg=The%20eternally%20wounded%20woman%20:&searchCode=TALL&searchType=1
http://webcat1.library.ubc.ca/vwebv/search?searchArg=The%20eternally%20wounded%20woman%20:&searchCode=TALL&searchType=1
http://webcat1.library.ubc.ca/vwebv/search?searchArg=Smith-Rosenberg,%20Carroll.&searchCode=NAME&searchType=4


13 

 

medical beliefs, they had to use this energy to bear children and take care of husband and family. 

Scientists warned that women who did not marry and comply with heterosexual family values 

risked becoming mentally ill and hysterical.
36

 Indeed, unmarried women who undermined the 

established system of Victorian sexuality and gender roles were often associated with hysteria. 

The fear was that they embodied women’s potential for increased power and rights.
37

  

University-educated and sexually independent ‘New Women’ seemed to pose a threat as 

they criticized the insistence of society on marriage as a woman’s only option for a fulfilling life, 

and many of them joined the proliferating women’s colleges in search of education and 

independence. The New Woman was feared because she threatened to become man’s equal in 

education, art, and the home.
38

 This ‘New’ or ‘Modern Woman’ clearly violated normal gender 

categories. By blurring male-female boundaries she became viewed as the embodiment of social 

disorder.
39 

Anxieties about men turning into women and women into men, and the effects of this 

on societal order, were exaggerated and out of proportion. Women may have been able to 

redefine social categories pertaining to sexuality and gender, but they did not turn around the 

established patriarchal order. The transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century may 

thus not have been as anarchical as many believed, but rather, as Showalter notes, “the 

embryonic stirring of a new order.”
 40

 

The seemingly blurred gender boundaries in the late nineteenth century went hand-in-

hand with anxieties about women venturing out from the privacy of their homes into the public 

sphere. Women began to enter the realms of politics, education, labour, and commerce, which, 

                                                 
36

 Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, 10; Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct, 199-215, 262.  
37

 Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, 19, 23.  
38

 Ibid., 38; Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct, 245, 247, 254. 
39

 Ibid., 265. 
40

 Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, 18.  



14 

 

for a long time, had been mostly male bastions. Leisure time expanded and so did recreational 

possibilities in which women increasingly wanted to participate.
41

 Despite anxieties about 

women stepping outside of the conventional private sphere, the desire of many women for 

economic independence helped them venture outside the home to make a living. Some of them 

started careers as entertainers in theaters, in circuses, or, later on, as actresses in movies.
42

 

Women who made a living in entertainment industries in North America and/or Europe at 

the time came from a wide variety of socio-economic backgrounds. Davis notes in her work on 

actresses in the Victorian era that female performers “were recruited from all classes of society,” 

that their “incomes spanned the highest upper middle-class salary and the lowest working-class 

wage,” which “made them anomalous among middle-class professionals.”
43

 This was equally 

true for performers who sought employment in the North American and European entertainment 

industries in the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. In the case of 

aerialists like Charmion, Barbette, and Coleman, their salaries depended on the success and 

spectacularity of their acts. Their careers were often relatively short as a consequence of the 

intensely physical and dangerous nature of their professions. Their contracts ended when they 

were no longer capable of performing spectacular aerial routines, became injured, or lost their 

lives while performing. 

It is in the context of shifting notions of the gendered body and the purity campaigns at 

the turn of the twentieth century that the performances of Charmion should be understood.  Her 

                                                 
41

 Peiss, “Going Public,” 824. It needs to be stressed that the distinction between private and public could not as 

easily be made for black women. Like many black men, they typically worked outside of the home to provide for 

their families. 
42

 Angela Woollacott, “Female Performance Practice on the Fin-de-Siècle Popular Stages of London and Paris: 

Experiment and Advertisement; Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern,” 

Women’s History Review 20 (1) (2011): 174.  
43

 Tracy Davis, Actresses as Working Women. Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture (London: Routledge, 1991), 

3.  



15 

 

popularity coincided with the image and activities of the aforementioned ‘New Woman’ and 

women’s suffrage movements in North America and Europe. While each of these women, in 

their own way, strove for women’s progress and emancipation, female performers like Charmion 

were often less likely to be seen as a threat to patriarchal values because they operated in a 

presumably imaginary and fantastic realm. Also, despite apparent similarities between these 

women, female performers were less likely to have been believed to have political motives of 

some kind.
44

 Instead, as Woolacott points out, their performances, creativity, and bodily display 

took them into the spotlights and on transnational tours. Their performances were crucial 

vehicles “through which women shaped racialized and gendered conceptions, and indeed 

modernity itself.”
45

 

Charmion, born in Sacramento, California in 1875, performed primarily in vaudeville 

theaters in the United States, though she also toured Europe, including England, France and 

Germany. Her career as an aerialist spanned the years of 1897 and 1910, and her early 

performances took place in what Davis calls “the Naughty Nineties,” a “decade punctuated by 

successive conservative backlashes against liberalism in sexual and political realms.”
46

 Indeed, 

and as mentioned earlier, sexually titillating performances like those of Charmion were often hot 

topics of debate among authority figures and moral reformers, sometimes leading to their 

removal from theater bills because of their supposedly indecent and immoral nature.  

In Charmion’s case study, I discuss this push-and-pull between performers, their 

managers, and moral reformers over sexually transgressive acts, and how Charmion negotiated 

                                                 
44

 See Catherine Hindson, Female Performance Practice on the Fin-de-Siècle Popular Stages of London and Paris 

(Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2007), 40.  
45

 Woollacott, “Female Performance Practice,” 174.  
46

 Tracy C. Davis, “Sex in Public Places: The Zaeo Aquarium Scandal and the Victorian Moral Majority,” Theatre 

History Studies X (1990): 12. 



16 

 

such tensions. I also suggest that unconventional performances of gender and sexuality like those 

of Charmion helped redefine traditional attitudes towards the female body and its physical 

capacities. What is also significant in Charmion’s case is that she made good use of the 

developing photography and print industries to promote her act. Not only did she distribute pins 

and so-called cartes de visite with her alluring image to her audiences,
47

 she also agreed to be 

filmed while performing her disrobing act and so became the subject of one of Thomas Edison’s 

early movies around 1901. While photography and cinema at the turn of the twentieth century 

were lucrative means for performers and their managers to promote their acts and programs, in 

my study of Charmion, I illustrate how they also contributed to an objectification of the female 

body as a sexual commodity.  

Two years after Charmion had left the entertainment industry in the United States, 

Barbette made his debut as a circus trapeze performer. Though initially not well known, around 

1922 he started to develop his own solo act in which he executed tricks on the high wire, the 

rings, and the flying trapeze in vaudeville theatres while dressed as a woman and began to 

receive more newspaper coverage. While Barbette learned his acrobatic skills in the United 

States, it was in interwar Paris that he became very popular and was praised by a large number of 

French literary critics and artists like Jean Cocteau and Man Ray. His career as an aerialist ended 

when he was injured in 1938, though he carried on in his beloved profession as ‘aerial 

choreographer’ for various circuses in the United States.  

My study of Barbette is set against a background of postwar anxieties in France. It was 

believed that the atrocities inflicted by World War I on the bodies of male soldiers had weakened 

                                                 
47

 Robert C. Allen, Horrible Prettiness. Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill and London: The University 

of North Carolina Press, 1991), 270. These were postcards with performers’ professional pictures.  



17 

 

the French race, and the country as a whole. Barbette’s female impersonation act was particularly 

timely and daring in light of fears of this so-called ‘emasculation’ or ‘feminization’ of men, 

certainly because cross-dressing also signified homosexuality.
48

 Homosexuality in interwar 

France had a rather ambiguous status. On the one hand, it was suppressed and seen as a sign of 

weakness, while on the other hand, it flourished underground and in the works of homosexual 

artists like Jean Cocteau.
49

 It was Cocteau who, quite literally, fell in love with Barbette and 

brought him fame by raving about his gender-ambiguous act. Cocteau’s praise was soon 

followed by a large number of reviews by French art critics who commented on the beauty of 

Barbette’s act and the ingenuity of his gender transformation. I suggest that Barbette’s 

performance both embodied and played upon contemporary anxieties about the degeneration of 

the French race in a postwar context. His case study also illustrates the fluidity and changeable 

characteristics of the meanings of gender and sexuality during this time. 

Barbette’s success as a female impersonator was, among many other things, the result of 

the opportunities offered by the entertainment industries in Paris, where audiences seemed more 

receptive to unconventional gender-bending performances than those in the United States. 

Entertainment in Paris also seemed to be recognized as more central to the fabric of society than 

in the United States, where it was seen more as a form of ‘low’ culture. In fact, both trapeze 

flying and aviation had their roots in France. It was the young Jules Léotard who had started to 

experiment with trapezes in his father’s gymnasium and became credited with inventing trapeze 

flying when he performed in public in the 1860s.
50

 

                                                 
48

 Tait, Circus Bodies, 75.  
49

 See for example Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes. Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 

1917-1927 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 8, 15. 
50

 Galignant, “A Very Extraordinary Performance,” Spirit of the Times; A Chronicle of the Turf, Agriculture, Field 

Sports, Literature and the Stage, Jan 21, 1860, 29, 50.  



18 

 

Like Barbette, who owed a large extent of his success to the artistic atmosphere of Paris, 

Bessie Coleman must also be understood in the context of the increased interest of women in 

aviation in the 1920s, the pioneering role of France in this industry and its welcoming attitudes 

towards black individuals at the time. While the Wright brothers were credited for making the 

first successful powered flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in 1903, French inventors had also 

been experimenting with aircraft alongside their colleagues in America and other aviation 

enthusiasts in Europe. It was in 1905 in France that the first organization in charge of aviation 

guidelines was established: the Féderation Aéronautique Internationale (FAI).
51

 The first 

woman credited to fly an airplane and gain a pilot license in 1910 was French Raymonde de 

Laroche (1882–1919). Many other French aviation pioneers, including Louis Blériot (1872–

1936), the first aviator to fly across the English Channel in 1909, and Henry Farman (1874–

1958), would produce commercial aircraft that were known for their good quality and used by 

leading aviators of the time.
52

  

Bessie Coleman’s career took off around the same time Barbette debuted in Paris. Her 

interest in aviation came at a time when many male pilots, who began their careers during World 

War I, were out of jobs and performed airplane stunts and acrobatics for curious crowds to make 

a living. These ‘barnstormers,’ as they were called, were mostly men, though many women were 

involved both as aviators and as aerial acrobats. They performed acrobatics on the wings of 

planes while in flight, or while hanging on a trapeze or ladder from the underside of the aircraft. 

                                                 
51

 The Féderation Aéronautique Internationale, established in France in 1905, was the official organization that 

mandated the first air safety guidelines in 1910 for France, the United States and sixteen member nations. It still 

exists today and governs the eligibility guidelines for acquisition of an international license, and validates flying 

records. See Freydberg, Elizabeth Amelia Hadley, Bessie Coleman. The Brownskin Lady Bird (New York: 

Garland Publishing, Inc., 1994), 82.  
52

 For more information on the history of aviation in France (as well as the close connections between French and 

Belgian aviators and industries), see for example my earlier work: Ameye Thomas, Bieke Gils and Pascal Delheye, 

“Belgian Pioneers in Rally Racing and Aerial Sports during the Belle Époque,” The International Journal for the 

History of Sport 28 (2) (2011): 205-39. 



19 

 

Lillian Boyer (1901–1989), for example, was a wing walker who executed daring stunts on 

flying aircraft, as well as automobile-to-plane transfers and parachute jumps in the 1920s.
53

 

While Bessie Coleman did not seem to have engaged in wing walking, she performed figure 

eights and loops with her plane and occasionally executed parachute jumps. It is in the context of 

stunt flying in the 1920s that Coleman’s aviation career also needs to be understood. 

Coleman would become the first black female aviator, though not without the necessary 

challenges. When she could not find a flying school in the United States that would accept her as 

a student, she turned to France. It was in June 1921 that she received her pilot license from the 

FAI after passing her exam at a flying school in Le Crotoy. Though newspapers indicated that 

while in Europe she flew in France, Germany, and Switzerland (among other countries), her 

major aerial exhibitions took place in various locations in the United States. Coleman died under 

controversial circumstances in an airplane accident in 1926.  

Coleman’s case must be viewed in light of racial segregation/discrimination in the United 

States, the booming aviation industry in the West, and France’s more welcoming attitude 

towards black Americans, enabling a small number of individuals like her to gain a foothold and 

make a living in the entertainment industry. Paris in the 1920s was a major hub for art and 

entertainment and often associated with “colour-blindness.”
54

 Many of the large numbers of 

black soldiers the United States had sent during World War I (especially in 1917 and 1918), had 

remained in France after the war because of violent racism in their home country. Instead of the 

greater acceptance they had hoped for upon returning home given their contributions to the 

military, tensions between blacks and whites in America escalated in 1919 and gave way to what 

                                                 
53

 See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMDDCnHUo3c for video footage of Boyer’s wing walking stunts 

[accessed June 30, 2013].  
54

 See For example Karen C. C. Dalton and Henry L. Gates, Jr., “Josephine Baker and Paul Colin: African American 

Dance Seen through Parisian Eyes, Critical Inquiry 24 (4) (1998): 903-34. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMDDCnHUo3c


20 

 

was called ‘the Red Summer,’ a period of massive riots in many cities. According to Stovall, 

these postwar riots, as well as an upsurge in lynching, were mostly instigated by white vigilantes 

who feared the (presumably) newly assertive black population. These and other incidents 

reinforced the belief of many black Americans in the contrast between a tolerant France and a 

racist United States and contributed to the rise of a black expatriate community in interwar 

Paris.
55

   

While racial discrimination in Paris was not as obvious as in the United States, where 

segregation laws applied to most entertainment venues, interwar Paris was by no means as 

colourblind as many liked to believe. France’s tolerance of black Americans did not stem from a 

belief in racial equality, but mostly from racist views on black women and men as ‘born 

entertainers,’ and sexually available. As Stovall writes; “the vogue for blackness and colonialism 

so characteristic of interwar France, a vogue with a powerful sensual theme, tended to surround 

black American women and men with an allure of tropical sexuality.”
56

 Also, the black 

expatriate community formed such as small minority that it was not perceived as a major danger 

to French notions of racial purity.
57

  

While entertainment was for the most part a segregated activity in the United States, 

during the 1910s and ’20s the lines between elite and mass culture became more ambiguous and 

people from different classes, races, and sexes began to interact in the public realm.
58

 Interest in 

African American art, music, dance, and theater grew amongst the white population, and a 

system of patronage, which spurred the phenomenon of the ‘Harlem Renaissance,’ originated in 

                                                 
55

 Tyler Stovall, “Gender, Race, and Miscegenation. African Americans in Jazz Age Paris,” in The Modern Woman 

Revisited. Paris Between the Wars, ed. Whitney Chadwick and Tirza True Latimer, 21-33 (New Brunswick, New 

Jersey, and London: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 23.  
56

 Ibid., 24-25.  
57

 Ibid., 24.  
58

 Freydberg, Bessie Coleman, 25.  



21 

 

New York.
59

 So, while black performers were excluded from many white entertainment venues, 

theater stages and other entertainment spaces became key sites for the expression of black female 

and male identities, the circulation of expressive forms,
60

 and the intermingling of individuals 

from different racial backgrounds. It was this increasingly open attitude towards racial 

intermingling in the United States and the opportunities provided by the French aviation industry 

that helped Bessie Coleman establish her career.  

The case study of Coleman uncovers anxieties about black performers entering into a 

white field of endeavour. Analysis of the experiences of black individuals like Coleman 

demonstrates ways in which blacks negotiated discriminatory practices and sought out their 

personal aspirations in North American and European entertainment industries. It must be noted, 

however, that while there was a considerable group of white female aviators in the United States 

at the time, Coleman’s career was rather unique since she was the only black female aviator in 

the 1920s and does not seem to have interacted with other female aviators of her time.  

  

Thesis Structure 

 In this chapter, I have sketched a preview to my study by providing insight into the socio-

historical contexts in which the case studies of Charmion, Barbette, and Bessie Coleman must be 

understood. I have also referred to the concepts of Bakhtin and Turner - carnivalesque, the 

grotesque and liminality- that inform the theoretical framework of my study. In Chapter II, I 

elaborate on these concepts and point out intersections between Bakhtin and Turner’s thinking 

about the possible meanings and functions of carnivalesque or liminal spaces and illustrate how 

                                                 
59

 Ibid., 5, 30.  
60

 Brown, Babylon Girls, 5.  



22 

 

these thinkers’ concepts can be applied to aerial performances. Complemented with current-day 

understandings about agency by authors like McNay and Butler, I illustrate how the ideas of 

Bakhtin and Turner regarding societies and bodies in a continuous process of ‘becoming’ 

provide useful insights for my study on the history of aerialists.  

 In the second part of Chapter II, I provide insight into the methodological underpinnings 

of my thinking, emphasizing the importance of exploring categories like race, class, gender, and 

sexuality, both simultaneously and in relation to one another, rather than separately. I discuss 

challenges faced when attempting to reconstruct and understand the life stories and motives of 

performers when they did not leave much of a trace, other than a few newspaper reviews, 

photographs, and in some cases, film footage. Biographical case studies, as I illustrate, provide 

nevertheless useful avenues for exploring the life and work of performers like Barbette, 

Coleman, and Charmion, even though my reconstructions of their careers and performances are 

incomplete and leave much to the imagination. At the end of the chapter, I address and reflect 

upon the specific source materials used for each performer’s analysis, setting the stage for the 

introduction of their case studies in Chapters III, IV, and V.   

 In Chapter III, entitled “Flying, Flirting and Flexing: Charmion’s Trapeze Act, Sexuality, 

and Physical Culture at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” I study Charmion’s career as trapeze 

artist and strongwoman, suggesting a reading of her controversial performances as both 

liberating and restricting of women’s agency at the time. Her clever use of the developing 

photography, print, and cinema industries contributed to her popularity as an icon of female 

health and beauty, though also encouraged an objectification of the female body as a sexual 

commodity.   



23 

 

Chapter IV, entitled “Le Numéro Barbette: Destabilizing Gender on the High Wire, the 

Rings, and the Flying Trapeze,” provides insight into Barbette’s controversial aerial 

performances as a female impersonator and suggests that his gender-bending acts allowed his 

spectators to imagine different gender possibilities without fear of repercussion. Indeed, since his 

performances took place in a carnivalesque/liminal atmosphere where, as Cocteau has noted, 

“truth ha[d] no currency,” and “anything natural ha[d] no value,”
61

 his physically and socially 

daring performances were not immediately perceived as threatening, but were instead welcomed 

with much praise and applause. 

In Chapter V, “Bessie Coleman: “The Only Race Aviatrix in the World,” ”I have set 

Coleman’s story against a background of the booming aviation industries in the United States 

and Europe in the 1920s. I suggest that Coleman’s aerial performances on the intersection of 

changing gender, race, and class definitions were unique - though emblematic of African 

Americans’ struggle to enter aviation, a white field of endeavour. Coleman’s clever play with 

categories of racial and gendered identity was effective in establishing her career as a well-

respected and skilled aviation pioneer.  

In my last concluding chapter, I revisit theoretical and contextual connections made 

throughout my study, while suggesting new avenues for future research. I draw parallels between 

my study and current events, in which I see aspects of my study reflected and suggest that the 

topic of aerial performances in the past as well as in the present leaves much more to be 

discovered and explored.

                                                 
61

 Jean Cocteau, “Le Numéro Barbette, ” Extrait de la Nouvelle Revue Française, July 1st (1926): 35-36. Translation 

by Francis Steegmuller. Francis Steegmuller, Cocteau A Biography (Boston, Toronto: Little, Brown and Company 

(1970): 366. 



24 

 

Chapter II: Framing and Tracing the Aerial Body 

Framing  

The flier momentarily acts out the desire of physical bodies to defy the gravity of 

social categories, before returning to familiar territory when he or she halts the 

free fall and reinstates gender identity and the material order of bodies. Physical 

bodies in circus are viewed within the spectator’s perception of physical freedoms 

which extend beyond social categories. 

 Peta Tait, “Feminine Free Fall,” 33-34. 

 

 The importance of performance and its centrality within culture, as advocated by Paul 

Bouissac in 1976,
1
 has been explored by authors such as Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) and 

Victor Turner (1920–1983). Both men were inspired by folklorist writers like François Rabelais 

(c.1494–1553) and Arnold Van Gennep (1973–1957) and their works were published around the 

same time. Turner’s book The Ritual Process: Structure and Antistructure (1969) appeared only 

one year after Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World had been translated to English (1968). 

Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque and Turner’s concept of liminality, as I will demonstrate, 

have much in common and are particularly appropriate for generating a more detailed 

understanding of the aerial performances discussed in my study. While these theorists did not 

explicitly address gender, race or sexuality in their works, I will show how their thinking 

nevertheless proves useful in analyzing the racialized/gendered/sexualized and/or classed aerial 

body between 1880 and 1930.  

 

Introducing Bakhtin 

 Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) was a Russian philosopher, literary critic, and novelist 

whose controversial work produced in the Soviet Union in the 1920s did not receive much 

                                                 
1
 Paul Bouissac, Circus and Culture. A Semiotic Approach (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 

1976), 9.  



25 

 

attention until it was (re)discovered in the 1960s. His writing about carnival is known primarily 

through his book Rabelais and His World. In this work Bakhtin addresses ideas and writings of 

French Renaissance novelist François Rabelais (c. 1494–1553) and uses them to express his own 

dissatisfaction with the autocratic Russian regime in the 1920s and ’30s. That his book was not 

allowed to be published until 1965
2
 was not surprising since it was believed to be “a hymn to the 

common man,”
3 

an advocacy on behalf of the lower classes in society, a celebration of the 

unofficial, and a mocking of authority. As Holquist points out, Rabelais and His World was “an 

attempt to show the ways in which the Russian revolution had lost touch with its roots in the 

people and a valiant effort to bring the folk with its corrosive laughter back into the work of 

politics.…”
4
 While Rabelais and His World was not translated into English until 1968,

5
 

Bakhtin’s ideas regarding carnival and the carnivalesque are now used widely in various 

academic disciplines, including medieval history, art, literature, and feminist studies.
6
  

 The carnivalesque in Bakhtin’s work historically refers to the temporary suspension of 

social hierarchies, as was characteristic of medieval carnivals. During carnival, for example, the 

minstrels would typically mock the king. These inversions of polite society were accepted only 

within the confinements of a particular time and place (the period of carnival) and were not 

tolerated outside of that. In other words, society was expected to return to its original hierarchies 

                                                 
2
 Michael Holquist, “Prologue,” In Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, xiii-xxiii (Bloomington, IN: Indiana 

Press, 1984), xxi  
3
 Ibid., xviii.  

4
 Ibid., xxii.  

5
 Krystyna Pomorksa, “Foreword,” In Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, vii-xii (Bloomington, IN: Indiana 

Press, 1984), vii.  
6
 I would also say that in the particular domains of sport and gender history/sociology, Bakhtin has yet to receive the 

attention he deserves.  



26 

 

and social conventions once the period of carnival was over. Carnival was thus associated with 

fantasy, though there was always the fear that this ‘utopian’ social model might become reality.
7
  

 Underlying much of Bakhtin’s thinking is his concept of ‘dialogism.’ Simply stated, 

dialogism refers to the idea that it is only through dialogue or a sharing of texts (also often 

referred to as ‘intertextuality’
8
) — that knowledge can be generated and (re)shaped:

9
   

…we are actually dealing with someone else’s words more often than with our 

own. Either we remember and respond to someone else’s words … ; or we 

represent them in order to argue, disagree, or defend them … ; or finally, we carry 

on an inner dialogue, responding to someone’s words …. In each case someone 

else’s speech makes it possible to generate our own and thus becomes an 

indispensable factor in the creative power of language.
10

 

 

In other words, according to Bakhtin, we cannot exist outside of dialogical relations. It is through 

dialogue, be it speech, gestures, performances, symbols, or art that we understand and shape our 

reality.  

  Dialogism also has another function: that of resisting authoritative discourses. Dialogism, 

Bakhtin argued, opposes authoritarian monologues that are characteristic of those in power in 

society.
11

 Dialogue provides marginalized groups with a means through which dominant 

discourses can be challenged. Moreover, Bakhtin also pointed out that although those in 

authority often attempted to avoid association or dialogue with those in the ‘lower strata’ at all 

cost, this was virtually impossible. As Stallybrass and White explain,  

                                                 
7
 See Neil Ravenscroft and Paul Gilchrist, “Spaces of Transgression: Governance, Discipline and Reworking the 

Carnivalesque,” Leisure Studies 28 (1) (2009): 45, 35-49. See also Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics 

and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986).  
8
 The term intertextuality was coined by Julia Kristeva in the 1960s and derived from Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism 

and polyphony. See Joan W. Scott, “Feminist Reverberations,” A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 13 (3) 

(2002): 14-15.  
9
 Kay Halasek, “Feminism and Bakhtin: Dialogic Reading in the Academy,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 22 (1) 

(1992): 68.  
10

 Pomorksa,“Foreword,” ix.  
11

 Ibid., x.  



27 

 

the ‘top’ attempts to reject and eliminate the ‘bottom’ for reasons of prestige and 

status, only to discover, not only that it is in some way frequently dependent upon 

that low-Other… but also that the top includes that low symbolically, as a primary 

eroticized constituent of its own fantasy life. The result is a mobile, conflictual 

fusion of power, fear and desire in the construction of subjectivity: a 

psychological dependence upon precisely those Others which are being rigorously 

opposed and excluded at the social level. It is for this reason that what is socially 

peripheral is so frequently symbolically central…. This is evidenced by the 

history of representation of ‘low’ entertainment and the carnivalesque…”
12 

 

 

 

Carnival and the Carnivalesque  

 Carnival, a festive European tradition generally associated with the Middle Ages, was a 

period of time during which societal hierarchies were suspended or inverted, providing all social 

classes (at least in theory) with the opportunity to mingle and interact. Carnival provided a space 

for dialogue between high and low, a space where both could behave in ways that were not 

usually acceptable outside of the time of carnival. In addition, carnival provided a platform for 

marginalized classes to mock those in power and to suggest new possibilities in terms of the 

organization of society and its categories that were normally taken for granted.   

“As opposed to the official feast,” Bakhtin explained,  

the carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the 

established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, 

norms and prohibitions. Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, 

change and renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalized and completed.
13

 

 

The temporary suspension of hierarchies created a special kind of communication that was 

impossible in everyday life. Characteristic of this new way of communicating was “market place 

speech and gesture, frank and free, permitting no distance between those who came in contact 

                                                 
12

 Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 5-6. Italics are original.  
13

 Mikail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 

1984 (1968)), 10.  



28 

 

with each other and liberating from norms of etiquette and decency imposed at other times.”
14

 

The period of carnival meant “a second life, a second world of folk culture, … a parody of the 

extra-carnival life, a ‘world inside out.’ ”
15

 

 A “world inside out” was also what the popular entertainment industries offered its 

audiences between 1880 and 1930.
16

 Circuses, vaudeville theaters and open-air fairs were spaces 

in which people from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds could mingle and interact. These 

spaces were considered separate from everyday reality and were generally associated with 

fantasy. “Full of ambivalent laughter,”
17

 these spaces permitted performers to mock the “official 

culture”
18

 and criticize societal hierarchies and (constraining) ideologies. In one way, these 

spaces presented an ideal world, a utopia in which total freedom was permitted.
19

 On the other 

hand, however, this sense of freedom was “accompanied by the fear that this potential 

subversion [of hierarchies] may be generalized,”
20

 and thus be extended beyond the realm of the 

fantastic into everyday reality.  

According to Ravenscroft and Gilchrist, it is naïve to think of Bakhtin’s carnival as a 

space in which ‘total freedom’ was permitted. While this may have seemed the case, carnival, as 

well as popular entertainment in North America and Europe between 1880 and 1930, functioned 

more as a means for those in power to maintain control over practices that were considered 

deviant, than an actual celebration of unrestricted freedoms. Allowing deviant practices within 

                                                 
14

 Ibid., 10.  
15

 Ibid., 12.  
16

 Of course parallels between the concept of the carnivalesque and today’s forms of popular entertainment (e.g. 

sport games, theater, ballet, ...), social ‘deviant’ festivities (e.g. Halloween), or social revolts (e.g. the 2013 

Vancouver Winter Olympics riots) can be drawn and studied.  
17

 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Carnival and the Carnivalesque,” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. A Reader, ed. John 

Storey, 250-259 (London: Prentice Hall, 1994), 256.  
18

 Pomorksa, “Foreword,” x.  
19

 Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 7. 
20

 Bouissac, Circus and Culture, 8.  



29 

 

well-defined spaces such as theaters, circuses and open-air fairs, provided spectators and 

performers with a sense of freedom. However, this freedom was indeed rather artificial because 

it seldom led to (political) change outside of the carnivalesque space.
21

  

Though entertainment venues offered platforms for transgressive behaviours, “the license 

to transgress” was always “a bounded license.”
22 

In the context of this study, aerialists constantly 

had to balance their personal aspirations with societal norms in the ways in which they 

constructed their performances. If they wanted to be provocative, they had to be careful not to be 

too transgressive and ensure they worked within the existing ideological framework that 

stipulated ‘appropriate’ behaviour and performance. At the core of Bakhtin’s carnival is thus “a 

hegemonic struggle for the positioning and repositioning of moral codes,”
 23 

fuelled by a constant 

interplay and tension between transgressive and disciplinary practices. Such tensions also had to 

be negotiated by aerialists like Charmion, Barbette, and Coleman. 

 

The Grotesque Body 

 Also central to Bakhtin’s work on the carnivalesque is his discussion of “grotesque 

realism” and more specifically, the grotesque body. The “bulging, over- or under-sized, 

protuberant and incomplete”
24

 body, celebrated in Rabelais and His World, represented “the 

people” and stood in sharp contrast with the “classical,” “strictly completed, finished” body 

representing the bourgeois society. Unlike the grotesque body of the people, all signs of the 

classical body’s “unfinished character, of its growth and proliferation were eliminated; its 

                                                 
21

 See Ibid., 37. 
22

 Ibid., 40- 41.  
23

 Ibid., 44.  
24

 Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 9. 



30 

 

protuberances and offshoots were removed, its convexities … smoothed out, its apertures 

closed.”
25

    

 Following Bakhtin's description, both female and male aerialists’ elegant and muscular 

bodies do not seem to fit within the category of the grotesque, but appear more aligned with the 

classical body ideal. Contemporary associations of the aerialist’s body with perfect muscularity 

and strength, physical health, and societal progress were indeed not uncommon,
26

 especially 

where male aerialists were concerned. Male trapeze flyers and aviators between 1880 and 1930 

embodied masculine virility in a time of strong anxieties about the seeming crumbling of the 

Victorian male-female binary and the  ‘emasculation’ of men as a feared consequence.
27

  

 In contrast, it was harder for female aerialists, and women in general, to escape 

associations with the grotesque. Since classical Greece, as Smith-Rosenberg argues, men had 

insisted that man represented the mind and woman the body, man the creative principle, woman 

the reproductive impulse, man the “heaven-born aspect of human nature, woman its earth-bound 

component.”
28

 The similar Christian medieval view of the female body as earth-bound and 

defined by its unique reproductive capacities was also at the heart of Bakhtin's concept of the 

grotesque:  

“Downward” is earth, “upward” is heaven. Earth is an element that devours, 

swallows up (the grave, the womb) and at the same time an element of birth, of 

renascence (the maternal breasts) …. Grotesque realism knows no other level; it is 

the fruitful earth and the womb. It is always conceiving.
29

 

 

                                                 
25

 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 29.  
26

 Peta Tait, Circus Bodies. Cultural Identity in Aerial Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 3.  
27

 See for example, Angela Dalle Vacche, “Femininity in Flight. Androgyny and Gynandry in Early Silent Italian 

Cinema,” In A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, ed. Jennifer M. Bean and Diana Negra (Durham & London: Duke 

University Press, 2002). 
28

 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: A.A. Knopf, 

1985), 258. 
29

 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 21.  

http://webcat2.library.ubc.ca/vwebv/search?searchArg=Tait,%20Peta,&searchCode=NAME&searchType=4
http://webcat2.library.ubc.ca/vwebv/search?searchArg=Circus%20bodies&searchCode=TALL&searchType=1
http://webcat1.library.ubc.ca/vwebv/search?searchArg=Smith-Rosenberg,%20Carroll.&searchCode=NAME&searchType=4


31 

 

In Bakhtin’s mind, the grotesque body with its ability to conceive, to grow, and to renew what 

was old
30

 was entirely positive. It was only after the Renaissance, he wrote, that the grotesque 

became misunderstood as “a purely negative phenomenon”
31

 and began to be associated with the 

marginal and the low - the direct opposite of the classical body.
32

  

Mary Russo, in The Female Grotesque. Risk, Excess and Modernity (1995), provides a 

more in-depth understanding of the relationship between the aerial and grotesque female body. 

Drawing on Bakhtin’s work, she argues that the view of the female aerialist as deviant and 

grotesque stems from her status as entertainer and risk taker. Meanwhile, she also suggests that 

risk taking was the only possible strategy for women to survive in the aerial entertainment circuit 

around the turn of the twentieth century. Using the example of female stunt flyers in the early 

decades of the aviation entertainment industry (1910s–20s), Russo explains how stunt flying 

became associated with female deviance.  

In the early days of flying (1920s) many women worked as stunt flyers and airplane 

demonstrators for manufacturers. Their important role as promoters of the aviation industry, 

however, diminished when aviation became professionalized and women were relegated to its 

margins. They were excluded from positions as transport and military pilots.
33

 Although stunt 

flying was constitutive of early flying practice and lay at the basis of professional flying in later 

years, stunting became an abnormal and increasingly liminal activity within the realms of 

                                                 
30

 Ibid., 53.  
31

 Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 9. 
32

 Ibid., 22-23.  
33

 Joseph J. Corn, “Making Flying ‘Thinkable’: Women Pilots and the Selling of Aviation, 1927-1940,” American 

Quarterly 31 (4) (1979): 556-57. 



32 

 

flying.
34

 Women in these positions became disparaged, Russo explains, because “they were 

increasingly a sign of the counterfeit, exhibitionistic, unprofessional pilot.”
35

    

While female stunt flyers were intriguing to audiences and drew large crowds, according 

to Russo, they remained suspect. This becomes apparent when she explains that the word 

“stunt:”  

bifurcates the notion of the extraordinary into 1) a model of female 

exceptionalism (stunting) … and 2) the double, dwarfed, distorted (stunted) 

creatures of the sideshow which stand in as the representatives of a well-known 

cultural representation of the female body as monstrous and lacking …
36

 

 

Thus, the female aviator was celebrated in her role as stunt flier, but was not allowed to fly 

professionally because of her alleged nervous, biologically unfit – and thus ‘stunted’- 

characteristics. For example, references to her ‘inherent’ nervous nature, especially during 

menstruation, and her consequent inability to steer an airplane, were not uncommonly used to 

keep women away from jobs as airline pilots.
37

 The trapeze performer’s extraordinary skills were 

also admired and celebrated as long as grotesquely muscular and physically strong females did 

not threaten to become accepted as ‘normal’ in society.  

Russo also notes that stunting or stunt flying was (and still is) a tactic for used by groups 

or individuals in risky situations in which a pre-conceived strategy was not possible. Stunting, 

she argues, belonged “to the improvisational, to the realm of what was possible in the 

moment.”
38

 Russo’s perspective of stunting thus suggests that the activity provided a means of 

‘survival’ for women aspiring to be involved in the male dominated entertainment industry. 

                                                 
34

 Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque. Risk, Excess and Modernity (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 19.  
35

 Ibid., 20.   
36

 Ibid., 20, 23.   
37

 See George Palmer Putnam, Soaring Wings. A Biography of Amelia Earhart (New York 1939), 159-160. See also 

M. Andrews, “Daredevils and Ladybirds: Gender and the Aviation Industry Before World War II,” Essays in 

Economic and Business History 13 (1995): 277-288. 
38

 Russo, The Female Grotesque, 22.   



33 

 

Importantly, similar to Bakhtin’s carnival, it also suggests a temporary and ambivalent agency 

confined to a well-defined time and place and only possible provided that the aerialist did not fail 

in her dangerous performance.  

The grotesque, as theorized by Bakhtin, is useful for my study because of its main focus 

on deviant bodies engaging in deviant practices from a place of creative resistance. Following 

Bakhtin and later theorists such as Russo, the grotesque body signifies both “debasement”
39

 and 

possibilities for growth and renewal. It implies a body that is oppressed but that is also able to 

challenge this oppression in creative ways. Moreover, the carnival is not “merely oppositional 

and reactive,”
40 

but entails a creative manipulation of dominant ideologies and restrictions by 

turning them upside down and by making them the objects of mockery and desire. 

Using a Bakhtinian framework also poses challenges. Like any other theory, Bakhtin’s 

thinking regarding the carnivalesque and the grotesque has its flaws and limitations and requires 

modifications when used in a different socio-historical setting than the one in which it originated. 

Many of Bakhtin’s critics have pointed to his glaring omission of women’s voices, to his failure 

to address gender or race in all of his work, and to his frequent insinuations of the female body as 

inherently grotesque. In what follows, I will demonstrate how Bakhtin’s seemingly antifeminist 

stance can be turned into a workable rationale suitable for my study on the gendered and/or 

racialized and/or classed and/or sexualized aerial body.   

 

                                                 
39

 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 240. 
40

 Russo, The Female Grotesque, 62.   



34 

 

Bakhtin and the Omission of Women’s Voices 

 Most feminist critiques of the work of Bakhtin are directed towards his notion of 

dialogism and his idea that under no circumstances monologue is possible. “We are constituted 

in polyphony,” according to Bakhtin, meaning that “we have all inherited languages from many 

different sources,” making any “attempt to rule out all voices but “my own” … at best an 

artificial pretense.”
41

 Bakhtin’s opinion on the impossibility of monologue and his claim that 

dialogue is a necessary condition for socially marginalized groups to resist and challenge 

dominant discourses are contradictory, and even ironic, when considered from a feminist 

viewpoint. At no point in his work does Bakhtin seem to consider the possibility that women’s 

experiences and opinions may be different from that of men, let alone important enough to 

mention. Particularly with regard to Rabelais and His World, Wayne Booth points out that, not 

only are there no significant female characters, but “even the passages most favorable to women 

are spoken by and addressed to men who are the sole arbiters of the question.”
42

  

 It is not that Bakhtin was unaware that his work was open to feminist critiques. This 

becomes clear when, in Rabelais and His World, he defends Rabelais (c. 1494–1553) — the 

French Renaissance writer on whose work Bakhtin’s novel is based — for not taking a feminist 

stance. Best known for his book Gargantua and Pantagruel (16th century), Rabelais used 

carnivalesque inversions to express a utopian longing and freedom from authority. Depictions of 

women in his work involved grotesque images and metaphors emphasizing the reproductive 

capacities and biological characteristics of women. Instead of suggesting that Gargantua and 

                                                 
41

 Wayne C. Booth, “Freedom of Interpretation: Bakhtin and the Challenge of Feminist Criticism,” Critical Inquiry 

9 (1) (1982): 51.  
42

 Ibid., 64.  



35 

 

Pantagruel could have been advanced by ‘allowing’ women into the dialogue, Bakhtin made the 

same mistake as Rabelais and adopted much of his thinking without criticism.  

Bakhtin defended Rabelais for not taking a stance in the querelle des femmes, a dispute 

that raged between 1542 and 1550 among French poets, writers, and philosophers about the 

position of women in society.
43

 Most of the works produced in light of this dispute were hostile 

against women — if not misogynist. Rabelais did not want to join the “Gallic tradition,”
44

 which 

“saw in women the incarnation of sin, the temptation of flesh,”
45

 nor the “Platonist” tradition that 

exalted womanhood.
46

 Although, according to Bakhtin, Rabelais was more aligned with the 

tradition that defended women, he did not join that camp because “he did not believe that this 

new philosophy could survive in the crucible of laughter without being burned up.”
47

 

Bakhtin also did not regard views that saw women as either “related to the material 

bodily lower stratum,” “the principle that gives birth,” “the womb,”
48

 or “the inexhaustible vessel 

of conception,”
49

 as problematic. These views were “in no way hostile to women,”
50

 Bakhtin 

claimed, and were entirely justifiable since laughter through mockery was fundamental to the 

popular comic tradition in which Rabelais wrote.
51

 That Bakhtin did not see any problems with 

such depictions is probably most obvious when he suggests that the “Kerch terracotta … 

figurines of senile pregnant hags”
52

 are excellent examples of what the grotesque entails:   

                                                 
43

 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 239. See also Joan Kelly, “Early Feminist Theory and the “Querelle des 

Femmes,” 1400-1789,” Signs 8 (1) (1982): 4-28.  
44

 Ibid.  
45

 Ibid., 240. 
46

 Ibid., 242. 
47

 Ibid. 
48

 Ibid., 240. 
49

 Ibid., 241. 
50

 Ibid. 
51

 Ibid. 
52

 Ibid., 26.  



36 

 

In the famous Kerch terracotta collection we find figurines of senile pregnant 

hags. Moreover, the old hags are laughing. This is a typical and very strongly 

expressed grotesque …. They combine a senile, decaying and deformed flesh of 

new life, conceived but as yet unformed. Life is shown in its two-fold 

contradictory process; it is the epitome of incompleteness. And such is precisely 

the grotesque concept of the body.
 53

 

 

Even if we agree with Bakhtin that images of the female body as grotesque can be 

justified when seen in a context of “ambivalent laughter,”
54

 depictions of women, such as that of 

the pregnant hag, that are “loaded with all of the connotations of fear and loathing around the 

biological processes of reproduction and aging,”
55

 are too ambivalent to be neutral.
 
In addition, 

the question still remains: Who laughs and “who are those to whom the defense is being written, 

who are those who are healed by this laughter?”
56

 As soon as we raise these questions, Booth 

indicates,  

we see that just as the original querelle des femmes was conducted largely by 

men, accusers and champions, this exoneration of carnival laughter is conducted 

by and for men, ignoring or playing down the evidence that the book itself largely 

excludes women. A man of great genius wrote a book offering a rich imaginative 

experience to men of sensitive and liberal spirit, and a male critic of great genius 

wrote a defense of that great book, addressed to other men.
57

 

 

In other words, in sharp contrast with Baktin’s own claims regarding resistance through 

dialogue, is the unsurprising discovery that the works of both Rabelais and Bakhtin are male 

monologues.  

 The omission of the female voice by Bakhtin, and thus his failure to “incorporate the 

social relations of gender,”
58

 may not seem unusual in light of the timeframe in which the novel 

was written. The lack of women’s perspectives is not strange if we view Bakhtin in the light of 

                                                 
53

 Ibid., 25, 26.  
54

 Bakhtin, “Carnival and the Carnivalesque,” 256.  
55

 Russo, The Female Grotesque, 63.    
56

 Booth, “Freedom of Interpretation,” 63.  
57

 Ibid.  
58

 Russo, The Female Grotesque, 63.    



37 

 

Western literary criticism, which has seldom acknowledged separate female voices, Booth notes. 

Nor is this omission strange in the light of the almost exclusively male criticism in the Soviet 

Union during Bakhtin’s lifetime.
59

 Objections based on an appeal to historical placement, 

however, are quite troublesome.
60

 Although historical placement arguments may be informative 

in terms of historical context, to use such arguments is to ignore, and simultaneously justify, 

women’s absence from literary works in past and present.  

If Bakhtin’s work is indeed troublesome because it lacks the voices and presence of 

women, how can its use be justified in a study that emphasizes women’s aerial performances?  

How can I use this work to promote feminist thinking
61

 without having to excuse him? The 

answer lies, as several feminists would argue, in Bakhtin’s work itself, especially in his thinking 

about dialogism. As Heikinen points out, several feminists have embraced Bakhtin’s dialogism 

“for its ability to provide a platform for marginalized feminine voices to be heard above the din 

of the monologic, authoritative, and hegemonic voice.”
62

 Also, the suggestion of Bakhtin to read 

texts from an “internally persuasive” perspective,
63

 a reading against the grain and against 

dominant ideologies, has encouraged feminist researchers to make new meaning out of male 

authoritative texts.
64

  

In his discussion about the dialogic aspect of language and its ever-changing nature, 

Bakhtin suggests that we should appropriate the words of other people and make them our own:  

                                                 
59

 Booth, “Freedom of Interpretation,” 54.  
60

 Ibid., 71.  
61

 See also Halasek, “Feminism and Bakhtin,” 65.  
62

 Denise Heikinen, “Is Bakhtin a Feminist or Just Another Dead White Male? A Celebration of Feminist 

Possibilities in Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman,” in A Dialogue of Voices. Feminist Literary Theory, ed. 

Karen Hohne and Helen Wussow, 114-127 (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 114. 
63

 Halasek, “Feminism and Bakhtin,” 70.  
64

 Ibid.  



38 

 

Language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself 

and the other. The word in language is half someone else's. It becomes “one's 

own” only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, 

when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive 

intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a 

neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the 

speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other 

people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must 

take the word, and make it one's own.
65

 

 

It is precisely this that I have attempted to do in my study on female aerialists. I have taken 

Bakhtin’s words — specifically his ideas regarding the carnivalesque and the grotesque body — 

and made them my own by transposing them onto a different socio-historical context and by 

writing on behalf of women whose histories have remained largely unexplored. By providing a 

useful paradigm of resistance through both language (dialogism) and deviant bodily conduct (the 

carnivalesque/grotesque body), Bakhtin does not need to be excused. A more productive 

approach, as Halasek also suggests, is to continue building on the ideas of Bakhtin and enrich 

them by incorporating that which is lacking. Thus, using a Bakhtinian framework while 

accounting for women’s voices and experiences will contribute to making “the monologue 

dialogic.”
66

 

 Since Bakhtin does not discuss possible gender or race-related struggles, his thinking 

may not seem appropriate for examining the ways in which the female body, and especially the 

black female body, was represented in modernity. One could indeed argue that using a ‘white 

European male’ framework to examine the lives of women of colour, whose histories have been 

greatly affected by European colonization, is controversial and will only reassert unequal power 

relations. However, I see value in addressing the gaps in Bakhtin’s work while taking his 

                                                 
65

 Mikhail Bakhtin. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and 

Michael Holquist (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1981 (1930s)), 293-94.  
66

 Halasek, “Feminism and Bakhtin,” 73.  



39 

 

thinking to another level. There seems to be something quite productive about not just taking an 

author’s words for granted but to modify and appropriate his ideas to suit one’s own arguments.
67

 

I will now turn to Turner whose concept of liminality is closely related to Bakhtin’s 

understanding of the carnivalesque. 

 

Victor Turner and Liminality 

 Victor Turner (1920–1983) was a British cultural anthropologist. He and his wife Edith 

Turner are probably best known for their ethnographic studies of the Ndembu tribe in Zambia. 

Their work on ritual, religion, and performance has been, and continues to be, used in a wide 

variety of contexts and academic disciplines. Victor Turner’s conceptualization of liminality, 

originally set within a context of tribal rituals, is especially useful for my study on female 

aerialists.  

  The term ‘liminality,’ derived from the Latin word limen meaning ‘threshold,’ was 

originally coined in 1960 by French ethnographer and folklorist Arnold Van Gennep.
68

 With the 

‘liminal phase’ he referred to the middle stage of the three stages he thought were characteristic 

of tribal rites de passage; separation, margin (or limen), and aggregation. He defined rites de 

passage as “rites which accompany every change of place, state, social position and age.”
 69

 

Applied to the transitioning of adolescents into adulthood in the context of tribal rituals, the first 

stage refers to “the separation from antecedent mundane life,” where the adolescent is sent on a 

(spiritual) journey. The second stage is that of liminality, “a betwixt-and-between condition often 

involving seclusion from the everyday scene.” For example, the “neophytes,” (referring to 

                                                 
67

 Ibid., 72.  
68

 Graham St. John (ed.), Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance (New York and Oxford: Berghahn 

Books, 2008), 4.  
69

 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process. Structure and Antistructure (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1969), 94.  



40 

 

individuals in a liminal state) were often taken to secluded places, like forests and caves away 

from their tribes. The third phase then is the “reaggregation to the daily world,’ ” and thus a 

return to the familiar structure of the tribe and entrance into adulthood.
70

 

 Liminal spaces, according to Turner, are not always necessarily secluded; they can also 

exist in public spaces, especially in performative spaces like carnival, festivals, theater, etc. In 

his book The Ritual Process: Structure and Antistructure, in which he elaborates on Van 

Gennep’s concept of liminality by applying it to different domains including performance, 

Turner wrote:   

One of the best ways of learning by experiences is through our performative 

genres. In our daily life, social dramas, whether in small groups or large, continue 

to emerge – offspring of both culture and nature – but the cultural ways we have 

of becoming aware of them – rituals, stage plays, carnivals, anthropological 

monographs, pictorial exhibitions, films – vary with culture, climate, technology, 

group history, and the demography of individual genius.
71

 

 

Most of these cultural performances, he said, belong to a culture’s “subjunctive” mood, referring 

to “that mood of a verb used to express supposition, desire, hypothesis, possibility, etc., rather 

than to state an actual fact, as the mood of were, in ‘if I were you.’ ” Ritual, carnival, festival, 

theater, film, and similar performative genres, Turner asserted, clearly possess many of these 

attributes.
72

  

 This “subjunctive mood,” is also characteristic of what Bakhtin has defined as periods of 

carnival. Carnival, according to Turner, can be seen as a public ritual that has its liminality in 

public spaces like “the village greens or the squares of the city that are … ritually transformed.” 

In line with Bakhtin’s thinking, Turner wrote: 

                                                 
70

 Victor Turner, “Liminality and the Performative Genre,” in Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle/ Rehearsals Toward 

a Theory of Cultural Performance, ed. John J. MacAloon (Institute for the Study of Human Issues, Inc: 

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1984), 21.   
71

 Ibid., 20.   
72

 Ibid., 20-21.   



41 

 

It is as though everything is switched into the subjunctive mood for a privileged 

period of time – the time, for example, of Mardi Gras or the Carnival Carême. 

Public liminality is governed by public subjunctivity. For a while almost anything 

goes: taboos are lifted, fantasies are enacted, the low are exalted and the mighty 

abased; indicative mood behavior is reversed. Yet there are some controls: crime 

is still illicit; drunken bodies may be moved off the sidewalks. And ritual forms 

still constrain the order and often the style of ritual events.
73

  

 

What Turner perhaps stressed more explicitly than Bakhtin was that even though hierarchies 

were lifted for a certain period of time, this did not necessarily mean that other structures or 

means to keep order were not in place - here referring to the fact that crime would still be 

punished and drunken bodies removed from sidewalks.  

 The idea that liminal spaces or liminal time periods lift certain restrictions usually 

imposed within an existing framework of authority and/or ritual is particularly useful for 

examining entertainment and aerial performances between 1880 and 1930. While aerialists 

stretched the boundaries of generally accepted ideas regarding femininity, masculinity, gender, 

sexuality and/or race, they would still have to comply with certain rules imposed on them by 

their managers or the owners of the venues in which they performed. Nevertheless, as Turner 

indicates, liminality in performative spaces and genres could provide “the scene and time for the 

emergence of a society’s deepest values,” and “may also be the venue and occasion for the most 

radical skepticism …”
74

 While ordinary life is itself a performance, as Goffman and others have 

noted (we play roles, occupy statuses, play games with one another, don and doff many masks), 

liminal performances, Turner wrote, are different:  

They are more about the doffing of masks, the stripping of statuses, the 

renunciation of roles, the demolishing of structures, than about putting them on 

and keeping them on. Antistructures are performed, too. But, still within the 

                                                 
73

 Ibid., 21.  
74

 Ibid., 22.  



42 

 

liminal frame, new subjunctive, even ludic, structures are then generated, with 

their own grammars and lexicons of roles and relationships…”
75

 

 

In other words, liminal performances, like aerial performances, provide arenas for the emergence 

of new ideas and new modes of expression, which may or may not have been adopted outside of 

the liminal spaces in which they originated.  

 As is the case with Bakhtin, Turner’s concept of liminality is also not without criticism. 

While the liminal (like the carnivalesque) space can be viewed as a space of creative resistance 

which suits my study on aerial performers rather well, the view of liminality as a space of 

possibilities cannot necessarily be applied to all those who are considered ‘at the margins’ of 

society. Eugen Weber, St. John notes, has pointed out that the potency and ambiguity of the 

limen or “border” and the subalterns occupying it has made the transcendent and apolitical limen 

something of a questionable model - at least within American studies. Indeed, St. John writes, 

“the optative” or subjunctive marginality implicit in Turner’s work may not always be suitable to 

perspectives on colonial history and/or gender politics.
76

 

 

Bakhtin, Turner, and Agency  

 As I have demonstrated thus far, both Bakhtin’s carnival and Turner’s liminality offer a 

framework for understanding creative resistance through transgressive practices that, under 

certain circumstances, may result into a redefining of established social categories. Like Rabelais 

and Bakhtin, who used their writing to explore “the holes in the walls between what was held to 

be punishable and what unpunishable,”
77

 female aerialists performed on the edge of what was 

acceptable in terms of women’s behaviour and bodily display. They dressed in men’s clothes 

                                                 
75

 Ibid., 27.  
76

 St. John, Victor Turner, 14.  
77

 Holquist, “Prologue,” xvi-xvii. 



43 

 

while flying airplanes, they titillated audiences by taking off clothes on the trapeze, they swung 

from one side of the tent to the other in tight leotards, and performed the same aerial routines as 

their male colleagues. They either displayed their muscles or intentionally disguised them. 

 While Bakhtin saw the grotesque or deviant body as positive and in the ‘process of 

becoming,’ Turner also understood liminal performances as “a realm of pure possibility,” “a 

temporary breach of structure whereby the familiar may be stripped of certitude and the 

normative unhinged, and interlude wherein conventional social, economic, and political life may 

be transcended.”
78

 “The processual project,” according to Turner 

recognizes that society is in-composition, open-ended, becoming, and that its 

(re)production is dependent upon the periodic appearance, in the history of 

societies and in the lives of individuals, of organized moments of categorical 

disarray and intense reflexive potential.
79

 

 

The idea of a performance or a performing body as ‘in a process of becoming’ is 

interesting in the context of aerial bodies and performances. As Tait and Stoddart have pointed 

out repeatedly, the body in flight seems not susceptible to social classification. The aerial body is 

a fantastic body, seemingly free from restrictions imposed on it by cultural prescriptions 

regarding gender, class, sexuality, or race. The aerial body, then, can be considered a body in the 

process of becoming, or at least with the capacity to become. It fosters possibilities while in the 

air. When the aerialist comes back down to earth, restrictions reapply. As Tait has pointed out 

(see introductory quote of this chapter): “[t]he flier momentarily acts out the desire of physical 

bodies to defy the gravity of social categories, before returning to familiar territory when he or 

she halts the free fall and reinstates gender identity and the material order of bodies.”
80

 

                                                 
78

 St. John, Victor Turner, 5. 
79

 Ibid., 4.  
80

 Peta Tait, “Feminine Free Fall: A Fantasy of Freedom,” Theatre Journal 48 (1) (1996): 33-4. 



44 

 

The idea of the body as a process is also what is at the heart of Butler’s conceptualization 

of gender and gender performativity. “Performativity,” in the words of Butler, “must be 

understood not as a singular deliberate “act,” but rather, as the reiterative and citational practice 

by which discourse reproduces the effects that it names.”
81

 Gender performativity, Hargreaves 

and Vertinsky explain, assumes that gender is not something that is “ ‘naturally’ ascribed, but a 

changing social construct, concretely expressed, but also fluid and changing through public 

performance.”
82

 The seeming necessity of reiterating gendered practices to reinscribe gender-

identity implies that the process is never complete and thus leaves room for agency. As Butler 

points out, “it is … by virtue of its reiteration that gaps and fissures are opened up as the 

constitutive instabilities” in the construction of gender, …”
83

 Synthesized quite clearly, McNay 

states: 

Change arises from the constitutive instability of the symbolic and discursive 

structures which invest the body with meaning. The cultural necessity for a 

performative reiteration of these symbolic norms highlights the extent to which 

they are not natural or inevitable and are, therefore, potentially open to change 

through processes of resignification. … By emphasizing the historicity of 

structure, the concept of the performative highlights how constraint is constitutive 

but not fully determining of gender subjectivity; in other words, a space for 

agency is outlined.
84

 

 

Similarly Turner has noted that performances can be active agencies of change, representing, 

“the eye by which culture sees itself and the drawing board on which creative actors sketch out 

what they believe to be more apt or interesting ‘designs of living.’ ”
85

 

                                                 
81

 Judith, Butler, “Bodies that Matter,” in The Body. A Reader, ed. Mariam Fraser and Monica Greco, 62-65 

(London & New York: Taylor and Francis, Routledge, 2005), 62. 
82

 Jennifer Hargreaves and Patricia Vertinsky, “Introduction,” in Physical Culture, Power, and the Body, ed. Jennifer 

Hargreaves and Patricia Vertinsky, 1-24 (London and New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2007), 5. 
83

 Butler, “Bodies that Matter,” 65. 
84

 Lois McNay, Gender and Agency: Reconfiguring the Subject in Feminist and Social theory (Cambridge: Polity, 

2000), 35.  
85

 St. John, Victor Turner, 7.  



45 

 

Both Bakhtin and Turner suggest a framework that views agency as both socially 

transgressive and limited. While agency is transgressive during the period of carnival or in 

liminal performances, it can also be seen as relatively limiting because it is difficult to practice 

the same kind of transgression outside of the carnivalesque or liminal space. The inversions that 

are applauded in the circus tent and theaters are the same ones that are castigated once the show 

is over. Nevertheless, as Russo also notes, “the extreme difficulty of producing lasting change 

does not diminish the usefulness of these symbolic models of transgression, and the histories of 

subaltern and counterproductive cultural activity are never as neatly closed as structural models 

might suggest.”
86

 

 On an individual level, both the performances of female aerialists and their engagement 

are a careful navigation exercise between what is socially acceptable and what is not, and can be 

seen as practices of “regulated liberties.” Following Bourdieu, McNay explains that the idea of 

regulated liberties suggests “a form of change which emerges, not as opposition or externality, 

but as dislocation arising from the reinscription of the tools and symbols of the dominant into the 

space of the colonized ....”
87

 Indeed, performances taking place in carnivalesque or liminal 

spaces such as theater, circus, and open-air fairs generally redeployed traditional social 

categories as defined by the dominant classes, and turned them into objects of mockery without 

being blatantly rebellious.
88

  

 Similar to the concept of regulated liberties is that of “technologies of the self,” coined by 

Foucault and referring to the techniques through which individuals create (and recreate) their 

                                                 
86

 Russo, The Female Grotesque, 58.    
87

 McNay, Gender and Agency, 58.  
88

 See Russo, The Female Grotesque, 62.   



46 

 

own identities like a piece of art.
89

 These technologies are “not devoid of rules or codes of 

conduct”
90

 and they do not liberate an individual from all possible constraints, but help “build a 

certain type of identity within the relations of power by using one’s own power ethically.”
91

 

What may make this concept difficult to apply to the performances of female aerialists is that it 

assumes that the individual problematizes the (transgressive) practices she engages in.
92

 Many 

aerialists, undoubtedly, were aware of their unusual positions as women engaging in provocative 

and socially transgressive actions. There were others, however, who may not have questioned the 

transgressive nature of their performances; born and raised as aerialists and reliant upon their 

skills to make a living, they may not have thought in terms of gender politics or resistance 

against the established order. The notions of regulated liberties and technologies of the self are 

nevertheless useful to specifically problematize the agency of female aerialists as they focus on 

the individual construction of identity, whereas the framework of Bakhtin encompasses society 

as a whole.  

 

Tracing   

It is one thing to imagine those bodies of the past, and it is another to write about 

them. 

 

Susan Leigh Foster, Choreographing History.
93

 

 

Following my discussion on agency, there are three broad premises that underpin my 

methodological thinking. First is the idea that gender is socially constructed or largely 

                                                 
89

 McNay, Gender and Agency, 9.  
90

 Pirkko Markula and Richard Pringle, Foucault, Sport and Exercise (London and New York: Routledge, Taylor 

and Francis Group, 2006), 140.  
91

 Ibid., 143.  
92

 Ibid., 153. 
93

 Susan Leigh Foster, Choreographing History. Bloomington (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1995), 9.  



47 

 

‘performed,’ and therefore changeable depending on its context.
94

 Second, gender intersects with 

other categories of identity such as race, class, sexuality, age. Third, women’s voices and voices 

of those who were considered ‘different’ or ‘deviant’ have historically been neglected at the 

mercy of white, male, European voices. By writing the individual’s ‘different’ bodies and voices 

into history, I believe that history itself may take on a different dimension, becoming more 

productive and complete.  

As pointed out previously, my aim in this study has been to critically interrogate categories 

of gender, race, and sexuality - an objective that has for long been also one of the main intentions 

and major strengths of feminist analyses. Joan Scott, among others, has repeatedly emphasized 

that feminist researchers should aim to deconstruct social categories and move away from any 

attempt to unify feminism, or to define ‘woman’ as a singular category. Instead, she calls for a 

more critical interrogation of difference and how such explorations may contribute to more 

inclusive and varied feminist thinking and historiography. Scott writes: 

We need the feminist analysis of categories of identity not only to detect the 

differentials of power constructed by binary oppositions that are purported to be 

timeless, natural, and universal, but also to contextualize and historicize these 

categories. Feminist methodology has taught us to ask about variation, difference, 

and conflict whenever we are presented with neatly contained entities…
95

 

 

The critical interrogation or ‘deconstruction’ of established categories that are taken for 

granted, as Scott points out, also involves a historical component. Feminist deconstruction means 

uncovering underlying power relations, while exposing the roots of long standing social 

inequalities. Examining social categories from a historical angle is of critical importance to be 

able to understand and act upon current-day inequities. The task of feminist historians, including 

                                                 
94

 See Butler, “Bodies that Matter,” 62; Hargreaves and Vertinsky, “Introduction,” 5.  
95

 See for example, Scott, “Feminist Reverberations,” 11.  



48 

 

myself, is then to investigate how certain categories emerged, how they have been challenged 

throughout history, what purpose they served, what purpose they are currently serving, and how 

they can be used productively in the future.
96

  

 It also needs to be noted that the illusion of the category of woman as a neatly defined 

and closed-off entity, is illustrated clearly in my case study about Barbette. While Barbette was 

not a woman in biological terms, he did perform as one and confounded categories of gender and 

sexuality during his aerial routine. One of the reasons I have included his case study was an 

attempt to exemplify the necessity of taking ‘difference’ into account. Moreover, through 

Barbette’s story I illustrate the aforementioned idea that gender, like the category of ‘woman,’ 

should be considered changeable depending on context in order to be used productively in 

feminist analyses. Barbette rendered categories of gender temporarily invisible, supporting Tait’s 

notion that aerialism has the ability to render social and bodily categories temporarily obsolete. 

Just like Charmion and Coleman whose unusual, risky performances made them stand out as 

remarkable and/or unruly women, Barbette’s performances with his emphasis on the 

transformation from a ‘perfectly shaped’ woman to an androgynous being, helped extend, if not 

defy, the category of woman.  

The notion that women’s experiences and identities must be studied at the intersections of 

categories such as race, class, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, is often referred to as 

intersectionality. This idea stems primarily from black feminists’ dissatisfaction with white 

feminist thinking that privileged explorations of gender over race or class. Black feminists 

argued that the experiences and oppression of black women could not simply be understood in 

                                                 
96

 See for example Elisabeth Grosz, “Histories of a Feminist Future,” Signs 25 (4) (2000): 1017-1021.  



49 

 

terms of gender, but required an understanding of race and class as well.
97

 Among the first to 

articulate the unique challenges of black women at the intersection of race, class, and gender 

were Sojourner Truth and W.E.B. Du Bois. Contemporary black feminists, such as bell hooks 

and Patricia Hill Collins, continue the legacies of these earlier thinkers by focusing their research 

on the lived experiences of black women and by encouraging other researchers to account for 

difference.
98

 In my study, I have also worked from the premise that inequality cannot be 

explained, “let alone challenged, via a race-only, class-only, or gender only-framework”
99

 and 

that “single-axis thinking” undermines knowledge production and struggles for social justice.
100

 

I have also worked from the premise that the experiences and performances of the aerialists I 

examine in this study were different from each other, and therefore each conveyed unique 

messages about the body and the culture in which it figured. To understand a culture and the 

place of the body within it, it is indeed important to study both the meanings a body may convey 

and how these meanings may change depending on context and time. The ways in which culture 

is inscribed onto the gendered, racial, classed, and/or sexual body can inform us about how 

power operates in a particular society: about who is most privileged, who is at the margins, and 

why this may be. The view of the bodily identities of women, as shaped by various cultural 

experiences and not just confined to that of gender or race or class, has also allowed me to 

                                                 
97

 See Sue Morgan, “Theorizing Feminist History: a Thirty-year Retrospective,” Women’s Histor  Review 18 (3) 

(2009): 392. 
98

 See Rose M. Brewer, “Theorizing Race, Class and Gender: The New Scholarship of Black Feminist Intellectuals 

and Black Women’s Labor,” in Theorizing Black Feminisms, The Visionary Pragmatism of Black Women, ed. 

Stanlie M. James and Abena P.A. Busia (London: Routlegde, 1993), 13.  
99

 Patricia Hill Collins, “Symposium: On West and Fenstermaker’s “Doing Difference,” Gender and Society 9 (4) 

(1995): 492. See also Creese, Gillian and Daiva Stasiulis, “Introduction: Intersections of Gender, Race, Class, and 

Sexuality,” Studies in Political Economy 51 (0) (2009). 
100

 Sumi Cho, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall, “Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: 

Theory, Applications, and Praxis,” Signs 38 (4) (2013): 787.  



50 

 

provide a more detailed understanding of ways in which aerialists negotiated opportunities and 

struggles as active agents.  

I have attempted to fill in some of the gaps regarding more general meanings of the aerial 

body and how this body was simultaneously molded and shaped by cultural prescriptions 

regarding the male and female body. I have also paid attention to inequalities resulting from 

aerialists operating with and against a patriarchal society. Moreover, while I have deliberately 

focused on the performances of three aerialists who are somewhat unknown, I illustrate how 

their performances sparked (and continue to do so) important discussions about the instabilities 

and fluidity of categories of race, class, gender, sexuality, and also inform us about the dialectics 

between “body and society and between agency and constraint.”
101

 

 

Reconstructing the Aerial Body 

 What Budd points out in the introduction of his book The Sculpture Machine, which 

details the history of physical culture in North America, is also applicable to my study on 

aerialists in modernity. Budd writes:  

Every age has its characteristic body politics. Their historical study charts changes in 

the way that a multitude of bodies – from the ‘natural’ to the symbolic – have been 

perceived and interpreted. We cannot think our way out of our bodies. Nor can we 

use the idea of a natural or more real body as a vehicle to escape from discourse and 

culture. What we can do is locate ourselves in relation to other bodies – historically 

and in the present – and to the institutions and discourses that seek to define and 

cater to them.
102

 

 

Hence, the body, as Budd underscores, cannot be studied in isolation from contemporary 

discourses surrounding it. Discourses about the body, or the various meanings attributed to it in 

                                                 
101

 Hargreaves and Vertinsky, “Introduction,” 10. 
102

 Michael Anton Budd, The Sculpture Machine. Physical Culture and Body Politics in the Age of Empire. 

(Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Press LTD, 1997), xiv.    



51 

 

specific socio-historical settings, can be found not only in text, but also in images, performances, 

bodily practices, tools, symbols, etc. The world, in this sense, can be seen as a text that is 

constantly being written, read, and interpreted. It is written and read differently depending on the 

background, location, historical time frame, and societal context of both readers and writers. 

What thus needs to be kept in mind doing historical research, as Valverde also points out, is that 

“language is not a transparent window giving access to the world but is rather itself part of the 

world” and thus “discourses are not an absolute beginning point but are themselves shaped by 

pre-existing social relations (mainly of gender, race, and class)….”
103

  

 Bringing the material body in dialogue with contemporary discourses regarding that 

body, however, is not always straightforward in historical analyses. The ways that performers in 

the past experienced their performances and bodies and the ways they were read by spectators 

and show-critics may well have been very different. While performing bodies, and the aerial 

body in particular, often evoked a sense of freedom, grace, lightness, and ease in the eyes of 

audience members, it did not show the hours of training, emotional investment, and injuries that 

often preceded the performance. While it is difficult to gain a profound understanding of the 

material aerial body or the aerial-body-as-flesh, certainly given the small numbers of sources in 

which performers like Charmion, Barbette, and Bessie Coleman talked about their experiences 

and bodies, it has nevertheless been important to my study to consider ways in which discourses 

“instruct” or discipline the material body,
104

 and how this body, in turn, instructs discourses.  

                                                 
103

 Mariana Valverde, The Age of Light, Soap and Water (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 10.  
104

 Susan Leigh Foster, “Dancing Bodies,” in Incorporations, ed. J. and Kwinter Crary, S. (New York: Zone Books, 

1992), 480.  



52 

 

The notion of “the performing body as text”
105

 has been particularly useful for my 

exploration of aerial bodies. The very moment the aerialist appeared on stage, her/his body and 

the ways in which s/he moved were exposed to various readings. Depending on the context in 

which s/he performed and the cultural assumptions of the individuals in the audience (the 

readers), the aerial body was read as gendered, classed, racial, sexual, and/or (dis)able. Most of 

these readings were not registered since they happened at an unconscious level in the minds of 

both performers and spectators. The readings that did survive are embedded in various 

contemporary newspapers, magazines, novels, diaries, movies, photographs, and other artifacts. 

An analysis of these sources or ‘traces,’
106

 providing insight into the discursive construction of 

the aerial body in modernity, is what my study is largely based on.  

 

Biographical Case Studies 

The quasi-biographical case studies of Charmion, Barbette, and Bessie Coleman are 

meant to illuminate ways in which the aerial body was a site of contestation of cultural values 

and how s/he resisted and bent cultural norms to serve goals of her/his own. Providing insight 

into the lives and careers of individual aerialists serves to illustrate the different ways each 

individual responded to cultural norms and how s/he negotiated opportunities and constraints. 

Biographical cases, widely used in historical research,
107

 are not meant to generalize, but to 

                                                 
105

 See Brenda Assael, The Circus and Victorian Society (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 

2005), 10.  
106

 Historian Peter Burke suggests that the use of ‘traces’ instead of ‘sources’ might be more productive for historical 

inquiry. Whereas ‘sources’ seem to refer to historians “filling their buckets from the stream of Truth,” ‘traces’ imply 

the fragmentary character of bits and pieces of documents, photographs and other artifacts the historian may find. 

See Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing. The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University 

Press, 2001), 13. 
107

 See for example Elaine Showalter,  e  a  Anarch    ender and    t re at the  in de  i c e (New York: Viking, 

1990); and Andrew L. Erdman, Blue Vaudeville: Sex, Morals and the Mass Marketing of Amusement, 1895-1915 

(Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2004). 



53 

 

illustrate the particularity and complexity of an individual or event and the circumstances (e.g., 

historical, social, economic, political) in which she, he, or the event was embedded.
108

  

 In most cases, as in mine, the author does not provide a full-length biography, but only 

highlights those aspects of a person’s life that pertain to his/her particular interest and research 

questions. In my particular study, I have chosen to highlight the lives of aerialists who engaged 

in unusual and spectacular performances, but whose activities, struggles and accomplishments 

have not been addressed as thoroughly as they might have been by other researchers. While I am 

aware that aerialists’ experiences and activities were highly unusual and not shared with most 

women or men in North-America and Europe between 1880 and 1930, the ways in which 

aerialists’ bodies were constructed in discourses do tell us much about contemporary perceptions 

of the (fe)male body more generally. In addition, and as pointed out earlier, studying bodily 

practices of the past can teach us much about cultural tendencies and anxieties pertinent to a 

particular society in a particular time frame.  

As I touched upon in my introductory chapter, the three aerialists’ case studies can be 

read as a collective biography. Collective biographies do not necessarily involve a large number 

of subjects. On the contrary, writes Cowman, some of the most successful examples involve no 

more than two or three lives, “but pay constant attention to the connections and overlapping 

between them as well as the points at which they may have diverged.”
 
Also, collective 

biographies are typically more fragmentary than standard biographies, sometimes only 

considering a few years in an individual’s life.
109

 For Charmion, Barbette, and Coleman, I have 

                                                 
108

 See for example Robert E. Stake, The Art of Case Study Research (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1995), xi, 

8; Robert E. Stake, “Case Studies,” in Handbook of Qualitative Research, ed. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. 

Lincoln, 435-54 (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, Inc., 2000).  
109

 Krista Cowman, “Collective Biography,” in Research Methods for History, ed. Simon Gunn and Lucy Faire 

(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 97.  



54 

 

indeed only addressed and/or highlighted those episodes in their lives that pertained to their 

aerial performances.   

 While recognizing that collective biographies or biographical case studies are limited 

because they never fully capture lives of past individuals and are often heavily biased by the 

perspective of the historian and her selection of sources, they do illuminate past events, as well 

as individuals’ actions, struggles, and beliefs. They also provide the reader with a broad and rich 

understanding of the context in which individuals lived and encourage reflection on how these 

circumstances may be similar to, or different from those in the present. Also, as Foster notes, by 

allowing the bodies of aerialists past “to carry their own inscriptive weight” and by giving them 

“more than just a sex or a set of regimented requisites, “they may empower us with a newly 

embodied sense of human agency.”
110

 

 

Sources/Traces 

 One of the challenges I encountered studying Charmion, Barbette, and Coleman was the 

difficulty of finding reliable and sufficient sources or ‘traces’ that enabled a reconstruction and 

critical analysis of their careers and performances. An additional difficulty encountered while 

examining practices such as flying was the reading and interpretation of bodies and bodily 

performances. Foster notes that performances, movements, and individually characteristic 

gestures, “elude translations into words,” and thus have “no facile verbal equivalence,”
111

 

complicating the writing of their history. Indeed, as Tait also notes, performances such as trapeze 

                                                 
110

 Foster, Choreographing History, 12.  
111

 Ibid., 9.  



55 

 

tricks “do not leave behind tangible effects” and knowledge of such performances is often 

dependent on advertisements and reviews.
112

  

Most aerialists did not leave written accounts such as letters, autobiographies, interviews, 

to enable the historian to better understand their personal aspirations and consequently, possible 

meanings of their performances. Nevertheless, the second-hand descriptions of performances, 

including a wide range of comments and criticisms that have been left reflect contemporary 

cultural tendencies and offer a window into perceptions of the aerial body for historians to work 

with. These traces, including reviews of performances, comments in newspaper and magazine 

articles, photographs, video footage, novels and poetry, provide valuable information and, set 

within a larger socio-historical context, assist the historian in imaging the past.  

 The majority of primary sources I have used in this study consist of a rather large number 

of newspaper articles found in both traditional and digital archives. One of the issues with 

archives, however, is that while they may contain a host of useful information, the information 

has gone through multiple ‘filters’ before it arrived in the archive or in the hands of the 

researcher. Indeed, long before historians can analyze these sources, other individuals have 

imparted rigorous selection on them. It is in this selection, as Trouillot suggests, that silences are 

created: that some events and individuals are left out, while others are not. “Power begins at the 

source” and 

silences enter the process of historical production at four crucial moments: the 

moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly 

(the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of 

narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of 

history in the final instance).
113

 

                                                 
112

 Peta Tait, “Re/membering Muscular Circus Bodies: Triple Somersaults, The Flying Jordans and Clarke 

Brothers,” Nineteenth Century Theater & Film 33 (1) (2006): 26.  
113

 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon, 1995), 19, 

26.  



56 

 

 

Archives indeed tend to exclude less privileged groups in society by preserving certain 

documents, and therefore certain voices, over others. Since the study of history was originally 

considered a purely male endeavour while women were dismissed as incapable or uninterested in 

its pursuit,
114 

women’s experiences have traditionally been neglected or considered unworthy of 

preservation.    

 To counter the importance given to the archive as authoritative source of historical 

knowledge, I have combined these various sources (newspapers, photographs, film fragments) 

with secondary, often feminist literature to establish a context that focuses on the experiences of 

women. I have used the case studies of aerialists as “alternative sites of historical memory”
 115

 

and shed light on the unusual and generally unknown performances of such aerialists.   

 In addition to archive-based newspaper articles, in my case studies I frequently refer to 

visual materials including photographs and film-footage. As Jordanova writes, such visual 

materials are part of the repertoire of most historians and can play important roles in 

reconstructing the past - if considered from an analytical rather than a purely decorative point of 

view. The same questions that are asked when analyzing textual documents are posed when 

examining photographs and images: who made them, what do they consist of, where were they 

produced and when, why did they come into being and how? There is usually no single ‘visual 

method’ that historians work with.
116

 Instead, most historians try to place visual materials in their 

historical context while discussing some materials in more depth than others, depending on the 

specific portrayals and characteristics of the material that are of interest to the research question 

                                                 
114

 Michelle T. King, “Working With/In the Archives,” in Research Methods for History, ed. Simon Gunn and Lucy 

Faire (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 16. 
115

 Ibid., 18. 
116

 Ludmilla Jordanova, “Approaching Visual Materials,” in Research Methods for History, ed. Simon Gunn and 

Lucy Faire (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 30-31, 34. 



57 

 

at hand. In this study, I have used photographs and film to contextualize the performances of my 

subjects and to gain a better understanding of what these performances might have looked like, 

how the performers represented themselves, and what reactions their performances may have 

evoked among spectators. In addition, I have used visual materials to analyze ways in which the 

aerial body was depicted and read as gendered, sexualized, and/or racialized.  

  

Searching for Charmion, Barbette, and Bessie Coleman 

  Searching for information about aerial performers Charmion, Barbette, and Bessie 

Coleman was not without challenges. Most difficult was finding sufficient primary sources to 

allow for a reconstruction of their performances and provide insight into their own motives and 

aspirations. As pointed out before, none of the three aerialists seem to have left written accounts 

such as letters or diaries, and the majority of materials left to work with, including newspaper 

articles and show reviews, cannot always be trusted for accuracy or bias. Not only did 

newspapers sometimes sensationalize acts to entice their readership, performers themselves 

created what Todd has called “stage biographies” in which they aggrandized their performances 

and sometimes made up certain facts.
117 

For example, Charmion portrayed herself as French (and 

not American), and informed reporters she had measured her strength with Eugen Sandow, 

‘father of modern-day bodybuilding,’ concluding she was almost as strong as him. Bessie 

Coleman told reporters that she had flown all over Europe and had ordered a number of aircraft 

for her personal use in the United States, though none of these facts has ever been verified.  

 

                                                 
117

 See Jan Todd, “Sex! Murder! Suicide! New Revelations about the “Mystery of Minerva,” Iron Game History 10 

(4) (2009): 8. 



58 

 

Searching for Charmion 

 Charmion drew my attention when viewing her provocative Trapeze Disrobing Act, 

filmed by Thomas Edison in 1901.
118

 Moreover, she was beautifully pictured on the cover of 

Chapman and Vertinsky’s recent book Venus with Biceps (2010),
119 

featured with flexed bicep 

and a fancy feathered hat, but very little appeared to be known about this fashionable and strong 

aerialist. Her absence in history books today is not surprising given the limited number of 

primary sources available on her career and performances.  

 My search began with visiting historian of physical culture and the body, David 

Chapman, in his home in Seattle, in the hope that his extensive collection of physical culture 

magazines would reveal more about Charmion. Chapman’s collection did not contain much 

documentation on Charmion - except for three of the pins Charmion distributed to her audiences 

- though he did provide insight into entertainment newspapers of the time, including the New 

York Dramatic Mirror, Variety and the Billboard. These newspapers reported on the theater and 

circus scene around the turn of the twentieth century and informed about theater programs in and 

around New York City. Chapman also informed me about Theodore Hull’s genealogical research 

on Charmion’s family, which would prove useful. Following his recommendations regarding the 

newspapers, I was able to access them on microfilm and found seven relevant articles in the New 

York Dramatic Mirror, covering the beginning of Charmion’s career in New York (1897–1898).  

                                                 
118

 See Thomas Edison, Trapeze Disrobing Act. Silent Movie, 1901.  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYlYTrni4-Q [accessed June 30, 2013].  
119

 See for example: 

http://books.google.ca/books?id=gySNRQAACAAJ&dq=venus+with+biceps&hl=en&sa=X&ei=l_BdUdXACca6iw

KI44CACg&ved=0CDgQ6AEwAA [accessed June 30, 2103].  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYlYTrni4-Q
http://books.google.ca/books?id=gySNRQAACAAJ&dq=venus+with+biceps&hl=en&sa=X&ei=l_BdUdXACca6iwKI44CACg&ved=0CDgQ6AEwAA
http://books.google.ca/books?id=gySNRQAACAAJ&dq=venus+with+biceps&hl=en&sa=X&ei=l_BdUdXACca6iwKI44CACg&ved=0CDgQ6AEwAA


59 

 

My search continued with a visit to the archives of the H. J. Lutcher Stark Center for 

Physical Culture and Sports in Austin, Texas,
120

 which hold a host of information about circus 

performers and strongmen/women around the turn of the twentieth century. With the help of Dr. 

Jan Todd, Kim Beckwith and Cindy Slater I gathered much information, especially images, on 

theater/circus performers and female trapeze artists around the turn of the twentieth century. 

Unfortunately, though, I found only one picture of Charmion — in which she is seen flexing her 

left bicep.  

 In between my archival visits, I searched the Proquest Historical Newspaper database, 

accessed via the University of British Columbia (UBC) library, for information on Charmion. 

This database covers four newspapers: The Christian Science Monitor (1908–1997); The New 

York Times (1851–2007); The Wall Street Journal (1889–1993) and the Washington Post (1877–

1994).
121

 I found eighteen relevant articles in the New York Times and eight in the Washington 

Post. In another one of UBC’s collections, this time the ‘19th Century British Library 

Newspapers’ database, I found several articles about her performance in London, England. These 

papers included The Era (ten articles); The Morning Post (six articles); The Graphic (2 articles); 

The Pall Mall Gazette (2 articles); The Standard (2 articles); and The Manchester Times (1 

article). I also searched the open-access Gallica database on the website of the Bibliothèque 

National de France (BNF),
122

 resulting in four small articles in L’Art L riq e and one in Le 

Monde Artiste, indicating that Charmion briefly performed in France, where it seems she was 

well-received.  

                                                 
120

 See http://www.starkcenter.org/ [accessed June 30, 2013].  
121

 See http://resources.library.ubc.ca/?searchtype=keywords&search=historical+newspapers [accessed June 30, 

2013]. 
122

 See http://gallica.bnf.fr/ [accessed June 30, 2013].  

http://www.starkcenter.org/
http://resources.library.ubc.ca/?searchtype=keywords&search=historical+newspapers
http://gallica.bnf.fr/


60 

 

 Though by this time I had collected a large number of newspapers, they did not offer me 

much specific information other than some details about Charmion’s act and some mixed 

comments by reviewers. However, a more extensive search online uncovered an open-access 

database called ‘Fultonhistory.’
123

 While this database, at first sight, may appear somewhat 

disorganized and confusing because of its various animations, upon clicking ‘Enter,’ a search 

engine appears on the left-hand side of the screen. The engine allows for a very detailed search 

of “over 21,790,000 Old New York State Historical Pages.” Searching for “Charmion” and 

related terms, I found a large number of articles from a variety of New York newspapers. Some 

of them contained small interviews with Charmion, which allowed me to gain a better 

understanding about who she was and how she presented herself. Newspaper articles analyzed 

include, though are not limited to Variety, The New York World, The New York Herald, The 

Syracuse Journal and The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. 

 When accessing the American Circus Historical Society website
124

 in search for more 

information on Charmion, I read an inquiry in their Message and Discussion Board section by 

Linda Hildebrand who wrote that Charmion was her great-aunt. I was able to contact her and she 

was pleased that someone showed interest in her ancestry. We exchanged several e-mails 

thereafter. While the enthusiasm of Hildebrand strengthened my belief that my research on 

Charmion was valuable, she also directed me to Theodore Hull who sent me Charmion’s 

genealogical tree (at least on her father’s side), confirming her Californian identity (and not 

French or Australian as some newspapers claimed), and indicating that she married twice and did 

not have any children. Hildebrand also sent me Charmion’s marriage certificate and some photos 

                                                 
123

 See http://fultonhistory.com/ [accessed June 30, 2013]. 
124

 See http://www.circushistory.org/ [accessed June 12, 2013].  

http://fultonhistory.com/
http://www.circushistory.org/


61 

 

she had found on the internet, and was pleased to have contributed to the study of her great-

aunt.
125

 

 

Bringing Barbette to Light/Life 

 I became interested in Barbette early in my research when seeing some of the gender 

ambivalent pictures that surrealist photographer, Man Ray, had taken of him. One picture, in 

which Barbette’s male genitals are flattened by a girdle and his hair and make-up are that of a 

woman, is particularly intriguing since it erases those aspects of the body we normally use to 

identify its male or female identity.
126

 During my preliminary search for materials about 

Barbette, it soon became clear that few researchers had made an attempt to capture his 

performances and/or personality in books or articles. I started with the UBC online Proquest 

Historical newspaper database, where I found about nineteen relevant newspaper articles in The 

New York Times and five in The Washington Post. During my visit to the H. J. Stark Center in 

Austin, Texas, I also searched the database of the University of Texas for information on 

Barbette. This resulted in an additional three articles from the Boston Daily Globe and three from 

the Los Angeles Times.  

 Since Barbette was born in Round Rock, Texas I had hoped to find more archival 

materials in the H. J. Stark Centre, though without success. Moreover, while I had e-mailed 

several individuals and archives who I thought would know more about Barbette, this resulted in 

only one (undated, though useful) article sent to me from the Harry Ransom Humanities 

                                                 
125

 In one of our e-mail conversations she wrote: “You can be so proud of this accomplishment and I am certain if 

Charmion was alive she would be too. It is done so well that I now feel that I now know my great Aunt …. It was so 

kind of you to mention me in your work.” Personal e-mail communication with Linda Hildebrand, January 20, 2013. 
126

 See Amy Lyford, “The Lessons of Barbette. Surrealism, Fascism, and the Politics of Sexual Metamorphosis,” in 

Surrealist Masculinities. Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Post-World War I Reconstruction France, 165-183 

(Berkley: University of California Press, 2007), 172. 



62 

 

Research Center of the University of Texas, Austin. At the same time, I had started to explore the 

collection pictures taken of Barbette by Man Ray and brought together in a small book in 

1988.
127

 These pictures, in combination with written sources, proved instrumental in imagining 

Barbette’s performance and on-stage personality.  

Another fruitful avenue was an enquiry into the archives of the Bibliothèque National de 

France (BNF). Since Barbette had spent much time in France and was well known by influential 

writers and artists including Jean Cocteau, Man Ray and Drieu La Rochelle, it seemed likely that 

the BNF would have information about him. I ordered a copy of a file folder containing 

approximately forty reviews of Barbette’s performances by French critics. The folder also 

included a poetic and influential description of Barbette’s act by Jean Cocteau published in La 

Nouvelle Revue Française in 1926.
128

  

 In addition to the American newspapers, the French reviews, and Cocteau’s legendary 

essay about Barbette, I relied heavily on Francis Steegmuller’s interview with Barbette 

conducted in the 1960s, as well as insight on Barbette’s act and personality from ballet dancer 

and friend of Barbette, Anton Dolin.
129

  Information about Barbette was also extracted from Jean 

Cocteau’s biographies by Claude Arnaud and Francis Steegmuller.
130

 Barbette has often been 

described as a ‘mystery,’ especially around gender ambiguity, and in many respects he remains 

so today. Although he died relatively recently (in the 1970s), very little information about him 

                                                 
127

 See Man Ray and Jean Cocteau, “Barbette,” (Borderline: Berlin, 1988). 
128

 Jean Cocteau, “Le Numéro Barbette.” Extrait de la Nouvelle Revue Française, July 1st (1926): 33-38. The folder 

had clearly been put together by someone, though I do not know who it was, when it was put together, or for what 

purpose.  
129

 Anton Dolin, Ballet Go Round (London: Michael Joseph LTD, 1938).  
130

 Claude Arnaud, Jean Cocteau (Biographies nrf Gallimard, 2003); Francis Steegmuller, Cocteau A Biography. 

(Boston, Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1970).   



63 

 

seems available. Perhaps this is not surprising given that circus/theatre performers often fade into 

oblivion once out of the limelight. 

 

Commemorating Coleman 

 Bessie Coleman drew my attention when writing my Master’s thesis on the history of 

female aviators in the United States between 1920 and 1940.
131

 It was during my research that I 

observed that most mainstream sources on the history of women in aviation did not address 

Coleman’s aerial performances as much as they mentioned and/or addressed the aviation careers 

of her contemporaries like Katherine Stinson, Ruth Law, Amelia Earhart, Louise Thaden, and 

other white female aviators.  

  To reconstruct the life and career of the only known black female aviator in the 1920s, I 

relied on two biographies: Doris L. Rich, Queen Bess Daredevil Aviator (1993) and Elizabeth 

Amelia Hadley Freydberg, Bessie Coleman. The Brownskin Lady Bird (1994), as well as a large 

number of newspaper articles from primarily black newspapers. Most of these black newspapers 

I was able to access through the Proquest black newspapers database, which was made 

temporarily available to me by UBC librarian Keith Bunnell.
132

 I was able to collect 

approximately 120 relevant articles from The Chicago Defender; 35 from the Baltimore African 

American, twenty from The Pittsburgh Courier; six from the New Journal and Guide; six from 

The Philadelphia Tribune; eight from The New York Amsterdam News; one from The New York 

                                                 
131

 See Bieke Gils, “Pioneers of Flight: An Analysis of Gender Issues in United States Civilian (Sport) and 

Commercial Aviation 1920-1940,” Unpublished Master’s Thesis, University of Windsor, Ontario, 2009). For an 

electronic version see: http://scholar.uwindsor.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1261&context=etd [accessed June 30, 

2013]. 
132

 The UBC library does not have a subscription to the Proquest black newspaper database: 

http://www.proquest.com/en-US/catalogs/databases/detail/histnews-bn.shtml [accessed June 30, 2013]. In other 

words, the UBC library does not usually grant access to this black newspaper database and interested scholars may 

thus miss out on this rich collection of documents providing insight into African American (popular) culture.  

http://scholar.uwindsor.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1261&context=etd
http://www.proquest.com/en-US/catalogs/databases/detail/histnews-bn.shtml


64 

 

Times (1922); one from the Washington Post (1922); and three articles from other newspapers 

(Los Angeles Times (1923); The Evening Independent (1926); The Lewiston Daily Sun (1926)).  

 While Bessie Coleman spent several months in Europe and France in particular, sources 

attesting her European flying performances remain undiscovered and her time there a mystery. 

French writer Jacques Béal wrote about Coleman in his recent biographical account Coleman 

L’Ange Noir (2008), relying upon some local French newspapers as his sources, including La 

Technique Aéronautique, Revue Internationale des Sciences Appliquées à la Locomotion 

Aérienne (1921–1940), and L'Aérophile (1893–1949). These sources, however did not offer 

information about Bessie Coleman herself when I looked through them on microfilm during my 

short visit to the Bibliothèque National de France (BNF) in Paris in December 2010. Béal most 

likely used them for general context about aviation in France in the 1920s.
133

 The two 

newspapers that may have been able to shed light on Coleman’s time in France, including Pilote 

de la Somme (1863–1944) and Le Littoral de la Somme. Journal d'Abbeville Journal Maritime, 

Littéraire, Commercial, Agricole et d'Annonces de l'Arrondissement d'Abbeville (1884–1944), 

were not accessible at that time. More fruitful perhaps was my contact with two members of the 

Bessie Coleman Foundation in Washington D.C., an organization that supports African 

American men and women in their pursuits of aviation. Coleman’s accomplishments are clearly 

still alive in their community and Coleman seems to be the muse and source of inspiration of 

many black aviators today. Through my membership in the Bessie Coleman Foundation, I was 

able to obtain a copy of Elois Coleman Patterson’s very short memoir about her sister Bessie, 

                                                 
133

 Béal unfortunately does not work with references in endnotes or footnotes, though only provides a list of the 

sources used in the end of his book. It is thus difficult to connect facts to their respective sources.  



65 

 

which I was not able to find anywhere else. Patterson’s account functioned mostly as a point of 

verification of what I had found in other sources. 

 Having established how I framed and traced the aerial performers in my study, the next 

three chapters, in which I present my case studies, will offer more in-depth insights into the 

performances, careers, and personalities of Charmion, Barbette, and Coleman. The chapters can 

be read as ‘stand-alone’ or as part of a bigger narrative on aerial history and the ways in which 

aerial performers helped destabilize gendered, racialized, classed, and sexualized notions of the 

body and suggested new types of bodily agency in North American and European contexts 

between 1880 and 1930. 



66 

 

Chapter III: Flying, Flirting and Flexing: Charmion’s Trapeze Act, Sexuality, and Physical 

Culture at the Turn of the Twentieth Century 

Introduction   

In 1901, American inventor Thomas Edison (1847 -1931) produced Trapeze Disrobing 

Act, a three-minute-long silent movie in which a woman, clothed in a long skirt, undresses on a 

trapeze while two men watch the performance from a theatre balcony. As each layer of clothing 

is discarded, the men become more enthusiastic, especially when the performer also throws her 

garters in their direction. Once she is finally revealed in leotard and tights - the attire of a female 

trapeze artist - the woman performs several tricks on her trapeze, smiles at the camera, and with 

a sensual gesture of her arms signals the end of her performance.
1
  

Trapeze Disrobing Act features Laverie Vallee, better known by her stage name 

“Charmion.” Born in 1875 in Sacramento, California,
2
 Charmion was well known for her 

provocative undressing act on the trapeze, as well as demonstrations of her muscular upper-body, 

in vaudeville theatres in New York around 1900. She also toured several European cities, where 

she was usually well received.
3
 Most of her performances, however, took place in America. 

Here, after much initial criticism for her sensual disrobing act, she became a popular icon of 

                                                 

 Thanks to Charmion’s relatives Linda Hildebrand and Theodore Hull for their enthusiasm and research help. 

Thanks also to David Chapman for his useful insights into the history of physical culture.  
1
 See Thomas Edison, Trapeze Disrobing Act. Silent movie, 1901.  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYlYTrni4-Q [accessed June 30, 2013].  
2
 See genealogy by Theodore Hull. 

http://web.archive.org/web/20030213013229/http://home.aol.com/_ht_a/pubdog/fam00187.htm [accessed June 30, 

2013] 
3
 One account suggests that Charmion’s act was not welcome in Berlin, Germany. According to the Boston Daily 

Globe her performance was considered “a grave offense against decency,” and removed from the program. Boston 

Daily Globe, “Editorial Points,” October 21, 1898, 6. She seemed, however, well-received in England and France, as 

a small number of newspaper articles indicate. The Era, a British theater journal even described her as “the acrobatic 

Venus.” The Era (London, Eng), “The London Music Halls,” August 13, 1898, issue 3125. In France, where she 

performed in the Folies-Bergère, Le Matin noted that “elle fera certainement courir tout Paris.” Le Matin, November 

4, 1898, 3. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYlYTrni4-Q
http://web.archive.org/web/20030213013229/http:/home.aol.com/_ht_a/pubdog/fam00187.htm


67 

 

female health, beauty and acrobatic skill. Nonetheless, despite her extensive transatlantic travels 

and long-lasting popularity on the vaudeville stage between 1897 and 1910, she has received 

remarkably little attention from historians.  

Charmion was among the first female performers in American vaudeville to take full 

advantage of the developing photography, cinema and print industries to promote her act. As a 

prominent vaudeville performer and one of Thomas Edison’s first silent movie subjects, she 

introduced a new dimension to trapeze acts by using her performance as a tool for the sexual 

titillation of audiences. Although the trapeze was used as early as 1830 for women’s callisthenic 

exercises
4
 and was typically associated with aerial performances of circus troupes, Charmion 

was one of the first to combine disrobing with swinging on the trapeze in a vaudeville setting. 

Her successful ploy was to offset initial negative reactions to her provocative disrobing by 

presenting herself as a physical culture advocate and dress reformer. In concurrence with 

increasing fascination with the well-developed muscular body during this era, as well as feminist 

campaigns to reform clothing that restricted a woman’s movements, she framed her 

performances as instructional examples for women who wished to show their strong bodies and 

learn how to adopt healthy lifestyles. Her marketing style, which included distribution of 

professional pictures, postcards, posters, and pins depicting her image to audiences, resembled 

that of her contemporary, Eugen Sandow, the much celebrated strongman and father of modern-

day bodybuilding. This strategy earned her the popular epithet of the “female Sandow.”
5
   

                                                 
4
 See Steve Gossard, A Reckless Era of Aerial Performance, the Evolution of Trapeze (Normal, Illinois: Illinois State 

University, 1994), introductory page. See also Jan Todd, Physical Culture and the Body Beautiful. Purposive 

Exercise in the Lives of American Women (1800-1875) (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1998), 106-107. 
5
 New York NY World, “A Woman in New York With the Muscles of a Sandow,” December 19, 1897.  



68 

 

 Charmion was just one among a wave of female strongwomen and trapeze artists at the 

time whose acts quite literally “flew in the face of Victorian values”
6
 as they pushed the 

boundaries of traditional notions of femininity and demonstrated new ways for women to express 

themselves through bodily reform. In many respects, the theatre’s association with fantasy and 

spectacle, far-removed from everyday reality, provided a carnivalesque space where traditional 

notions of femininity could be challenged and destabilized with few repercussions. Unlike those 

suffragettes and female reformers at the time who were often heavily criticized for their 

outspokenness and progressive ideas about gender roles and women’s claim to authority over 

their body, female performers like Charmion tended not to provoke these same criticisms. 

“[T]heir active, familiar bodies,” Hindson notes, were “rarely directly linked with the politicked 

icons of change in gender roles, in spite of similarities between the performer, the New Woman, 

and the suffrage campaign’s links with the theatre.”
7
 The popular stage was indeed one of the 

few places were women could gain rewards for their transgressiveness.
8
 

Indeed, the increasing presence of female performers on the popular stage at this time, 

coupled with the public display of their images on posters and postcards, stimulated a 

questioning and subsequent destabilization of contemporary ideological values and aesthetic 

ideals regarding the active female body.
9
 Certainly, performers like Charmion were powerful 

symbols of women’s physical emancipation and autonomy, encouraging a more open and free 

display of the female body. On the other hand, a consequence of the increasing reliance of both 

                                                 
6
 Andrew L. Erdman, Blue Vaudeville: Sex, Morals and the Mass Marketing of Amusement, 1895-1915 (Jefferson, 

NC: McFarland & Co., 2004), 115.  
7
 Catherine, Hindson. Female Performance Practice on the Fin-de-Siècle Popular Stage of London and Paris: 

Experiment and Advertisement (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 40.  
8
 Susan A. Glenn, Female Spectacle. The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard 

University Press, 2000), 7. 
9
 Hindson, Female Performance Practice, 3.  



69 

 

performers and their managers on newly emerging visual technologies, such as photography and 

cinema, encouraged a continued objectification of the female body as sexual commodity. 

 “Bodily (re)form,” as Reischer has noted, “both reflects and motivates processes of social 

reform,” but always occurs “within overarching social structures that ultimately index existing 

power relations.”
10

 Indeed, while performers such as Charmion encouraged female agency, they 

also had to work within the confines of a patriarchal entertainment industry that simultaneously 

offered and limited possibilities. Through creative bodily performances, artists such as Charmion 

were capable of producing new meaning, though they also reproduced existing power hierarchies 

through their participation in the male-controlled amusement industry.
11

 Starting from the 

premise that Charmion’s performing body was the site of debate and struggle over the 

transgression and policing of gender boundaries, and following Foster’s (and others) claim that 

the body writes and is written upon,
12

 my aim is to illustrate how Charmion walked a fine line 

between traditional and modernizing ideas surrounding women’s bodies and their physical 

capacities. While she alone did not dismantle patriarchal structures that tended to objectify 

women’s sexuality for the pleasure of men, she helped set new standards for female health and 

beauty that combined physical fitness, strength, and freer movement of the female body.  

                                                 
10

 Erica Reischer and Kathryn S. Koo, “The Body Beautiful: Symbolism and Agency in the Social World,” Annual 

Review of Anthropology 33 (2004): 315.  
11

 Glenn, Female Spectacle, 3.  
12

 See Reischer and Koo, “The Body Beautiful;” Susan Leigh Foster, Choreographing History (Bloomington, 

Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1995), 15.  



70 

 

 

Image 1: Charmion with feathered hat and fancy dress on the 

trapeze. Courtesy of the Billy Rose Theatre Division, The 

New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, 

Lenox and Tilden Foundations. 

 

From Unabashed Burlesque to Respectable Vaudeville 

 When Charmion introduced her underdressing act on the trapeze to her audiences in 

Koster and Bial’s New York City Theatre in 1897, her performance was received with a mixture 



71 

 

of curiosity and criticism. The New York Dramatic Mirror, a prominent newspaper commenting 

on the city’s theatrical scene, reported enthusiastically and at length on her performance.
13

 Near 

the end of the article the reporter admitted, however, that her act was “a vulgar exhibition,” and 

that it was “certainly to be deplored that any part of the public demands acts of this kind.”
14

 Such 

contradictory reactions were not unusual and were illustrative of the anxieties of a society in 

transition. Erotic stripping acts similar to Charmion’s had long been associated with burlesque 

venues which fed working-class male appetites for vulgarity. However, the introduction of such 

material to middle-class audiences - both male and female - in vaudeville theaters caused a stir.  

The atmosphere in the United States in the late 19
th

 century, prior to Charmion’s work, 

was marked by theatre censorship debates and suppression of performances considered too 

controversial or sexually provocative. The Committee for the Suppression of Vice, established in 

1872, was an initiative of Anthony Comstock, the first federally appointed censor in the United 

States, who believed that “obscenity – in pictures, magazines, newspapers, and books – was the 

most virulent foe that Christian Americans would ever battle. It caused crime, debased the 

institution of marriage, and threatened to corrupt children, particularly young males, the future of 

the nation and race.”
15

  

 It was not a coincidence that the Committee for the Suppression of Vice had been 

established soon after the controversial Lydia Thompson and her ‘British Blondes’ had made an 

appearance on the stage in New York and had started to incorporate burlesque elements in their 

performances. Thompson and her troupe debuted with the comic play Ixion, in which they played 

                                                 
13

 See page 1 of my introductory chapter in which I quote a large part of the New York Dramatic Mirror article in 

which Charmion’s performance is described at length.  
14

 New York Dramatic Mirror, December 25, 1897, 18.  
15

 John H. Houchin, Censorship of the American Theatre in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge 

University Press, 2003), 36, 37.   



72 

 

male roles and poked fun at political scandals and recent divorce cases among the elite.
16

 Though 

initially popular, the performers were later heavily criticized for their “sensual exhibitions of the 

feminine form,” and their “salacious music.”
17

 They inverted categories of gender, used 

inappropriate puns, exposed arms and legs, and were therefore considered a disgrace to social 

mores and a threat to women’s traditional roles both inside and outside the theatre.  

Reactions to Thompson’s supposedly ‘vulgar’ exhibitions seemed rather inconsistent 

when other performances at the time, such as ballet or plastic posing acts, produced similar 

degrees - if not more - nudity. In plastic posing acts, also called tableaux vivants, performers 

replicated well-known works of art, often partially nude and/or covered with a thin layer of silk 

or white dust.
18

 Performers remained static or barely moved. These forms of erotic bodily display 

were deemed permissible because re-enactments of well-known paintings or Greco-Roman 

statues were associated with elite culture and therefore considered tasteful. Moreover, ballet was 

generally considered an activity far more elegant and sophisticated than burlesque performances 

or the trapeze acrobatics of circuses and theatres.  

Further illustrious of such allowances within socially acceptable realms of artistic 

expression at the time were the views of Olive Logan (American actress, author, and suffragette) 

on nudity in theatres in the 1860s, when Thompson and her troupe were performing in the United 

States. Though Logan did not fully approve of the nudity displayed by female ballet dancers in 

The Black Crook, for example, she believed it should be tolerated because it served a higher 

‘artistic’ purpose - and also because the performers were French and Italian. “Those women were 

                                                 
16

 Ibid., 33, 36.  
17

 Writer in the New York Times (November 8, 1868), 4. Quoted in Houchin, Censorship of the American Theatre, 

34.  
18

 Erdman, Blue Vaudeville, 5. See also Rachel Shteir, Striptease: The Untold Story of the Girlie Show (New York, 

NY: Oxford University Press, 2004), 15. 



73 

 

ballet-dancers in France and Italy,” she wrote, “and they represented in their nudity imps and 

demons. In silence they whirled about the stage; in silence trooped off. Some faint odor of 

ideality and poetry rested over them.”
19

 On the other hand, wrote Logan, burlesque performers 

“are not devotees of any art … they do not either act, dance, sing, or mime, but they habit 

themselves in a way which is attractive to an indelicate taste …”
20

 During a Suffrage Convention 

in 1869 she strongly advised women against performing on the stage because “a coarse rage for 

nudity” had spread in the theaters and had become “the ruling force.”
21

 She wrote:    

I can advise no honorable, self-respecting woman to turn to the stage for support, 

with its demoralizing influences, which seem to be growing stronger and 

stronger day by day; where the greatest rewards are won by a set of brazenfaced, 

clog-dancing creatures, with dyed yellow hair and padded limbs, who have come 

here in droves from across the ocean.
22

 

 

Thus, the denunciation of burlesque performances seemed more concerned with its class-

associations than with any degree of nudity. The loud talking, singing, and dancing women who 

displayed bare legs and arms - and sometimes muscular backs and chests - stood in sharp 

contrast to the seemingly distant, silently moving ballet dancers or the motionless tableaux 

vivants performers who were generally associated with the elite. Clearly, suggested Janet Steiger, 

“nudity or the display of the anatomy of the body had meaning not in itself but within the 

circumstances of its representation.”
23

 

 It was exactly the ability of its managers to conceal nudity by representing it in a morally 

acceptable way that made the vaudeville industry one of the most successful mass entertainment 

                                                 
19

 Olive Logan, Apropos of Women and Theatres. With a Paper or Two on Parisian Topics (New York Carleton, 

1870), 135. 
20

 Logan, Apropos of Women and Theatres, 115.  
21

 Ibid., 124. 
22

 Ibid., 138.  
23

 Janet Steiger, Bad Women. Regulating Sexuality in Early American Cinema (Minneapolis and London: University 

of Minnesota Press, 1995), 57.  



74 

 

markets in North America at the turn of the twentieth century. Vaudeville developed in concert 

with other emerging forms of entertainment such as casinos, music halls, and nickelodeon movie 

houses, and was popular because of its wide range of performers, including dancers, singers, 

acrobats, and comedians. In the hands of keen businessmen like Tony Pastor, B.F. Keith, and 

Edward Albee, vaudeville acts became not only a more-than-profitable business for their owners, 

but also for many performers.
24

  

As mentioned above, the success of vaudeville lay in the ability of its managers and 

performers to maintain a veneer of purity and respectability. Although some of the acts included 

stripping and very much resembled those performed in burlesque theaters, managers promoted 

vaudeville as a pleasant leisure time activity for the middle class family.
25

 As early as the 1840s, 

as Kibler indicates, theatre managers had begun to promote their programs as “educational, 

uplifting, and family oriented, particularly appropriate for mothers and their children.”
26

 As more 

and more women began to attend performances at vaudeville theatres, managers forbade 

smoking and drinking because these activities were commonly associated with male culture and 

burlesque - and thus vulgarity.
27

 Of course, these strategies not only enabled managers to cater to 

a growing group of female clients, but also held censors at bay and prevented theatre closings. 

 

Charmion the Parisian Sensation
28

  

 Theatre managers had to be strategic about which performers and acts to include in their 

programs in order to satisfy a variety of audiences. Furthermore, performers also had to navigate 

                                                 
24

 See Erdman, Blue Vaudeville.  
25

 Ibid., 4.  
26

 M. Alison Kibler, Rank Ladies. Gender and Cultural Hierarchy in American Vaudeville (Chapel Hill and London: 

The University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 7.  
27

 Ibid., 7.  
28

 New York Dramatic Mirror, December 25, 1897, 18. 



75 

 

between the sometimes different wishes of their managers and audiences, their need to make a 

living, and their personal attitudes and aspirations. To portray themselves favourably, many 

performers, including Charmion, created and advertised their own “stage biographies.”
29

 Though 

born in Sacramento, California, on stage she introduced herself as French such that newspapers 

began to call her “the Parisian Sensation.”
30

 Paris was considered a major hub of extravagant and 

liberal living, culture, and performing arts at this time. Thus, to maintain a naughty appeal that 

was also permissible, performers often used associations with the city. The choice of Charmion’s 

stage name was thus deliberate.  

Adoption of a French stage identity by Charmion may also have been influenced by 

Florenz Ziegfield (1867-1932), well-known American Broadway impresario who was, according 

to one account, her manager at the beginning of her career.
31

 Ziegfield often strategically 

associated his performers with French culture, linking his scantily clothed ‘Ziegfield Girls,’ for 

example, with the successful female Folies Bergère dancers of Paris in order to escape public 

censure in the United States. According to Robert Allen, Ziegfield’s secret lay in his ability to 

package feminine stage sexuality in such a way that his audiences did not connect the Ziegfield 

                                                 
29

 In her paper on Charmion’s contemporary, strongwoman Josephine Blatt, better known as Minerva, Todd writes 

that “one of the problems with historical research related to circus performers and theatre people is that they do not 

only adopt stage names but also create “stage biographies…” Moreover, she notes that many circus and vaudeville 

performers had different acts during different stages in their careers and adopted different stage names, often making 

it difficult for historians to trace them. See Jan Todd, “Sex! Murder! Suicide! New Revelations about the “Mystery 

of Minerva,” Iron Game History 10 (4) (2009): 8, 7-21.  
30

 New York Dramatic Mirror, December 25, 1897, 18. See also: Glenn Falls Morning Star, Tuesday, May 10, 1898, 

2; Syracuse Journal, “Her Muscular Development,” September 1901. 
31

 Robert H. Davis, Over My Left Shoulder. A Panorama of Men and Events, Burlesques and Tragedies, Cabbages 

and Kings and Sometimes W and Y (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1926), 127. Whether or not Ziegfield 

was in fact Charmion’s manager is uncertain. It may well have been that she, like other performers, claimed 

association with the successful and popular businessman to promote her own act. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folies_Berg%C3%A8re


76 

 

dancers with the working-class sexuality of burlesque, but rather associated them with “the 

cosmopolitan worldliness of Paris.”
32

 

Charmion’s adoption of the trappings of a French stage identity to gain popularity was 

not the only trick in her repertoire. When asked why and how she conceived her act, her response 

was: 

At the time that I thought seriously about disrobing whole on the trapeze, it was 

a novelty and a thing unheard of. I immediately resolved to adopt the measure. I 

thought just like this: it wasn’t extraordinary for a woman to perform on the 

trapeze, in fact it was so common that it was a difficult matter to make a novelty 

of it. … As far as disrobing is concerned, the act is perfectly harmless; however, 

there is sufficient suggestiveness to it. ... That is what the people like, just a hint 

of suggestiveness and then they are eager to witness the performance even 

though they might criticize the feat.
33

  

 

Charmion was clearly sensitive to the desires and apprehensions of her audience. As she 

acknowledged, work on the trapeze in itself was nothing new. However, disrobing in mid-air was 

unheard of and something that not many performers before her had dared to do. It was something 

worth trying. One reason for her success was thus her ability to breathe new meaning into the use 

of the trapeze.  

 Around the turn of the twentieth century, flying circus troupes most commonly consisted 

of three or more performers working on one or more trapezes. Charmion’s act, on the other hand, 

was a solo performance on a static or ‘fixed’ trapeze. The term fixed, however, did not imply that 

there was no swinging involved, but that the act primarily consisted of “various balancing feats, 

                                                 
32

 Robert C. Allen, Horrible Prettiness. Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill and London: The University 

of North Carolina Press, 1991), 245. Similar strategies were adopted by other performers as well. Though not 

directly linked with Ziegfield, Vander Clyde chose the French sounding name “Barbette” and wore extravagant 

dresses ornamented with feathers and diamonds. Starting from a modest working-class background, Barbette’s 

exquisite performances were soon remarked upon by members of the French intellectual elite, including poet Jean 

Cocteau and photographer Man Ray. Raving about Barbette’s elegance, sophistication, and perfect performance, 

they brought him fame and made his connections with other famous artists and performers possible. See Chapter IV 

for a more elaborate description and analysis of Barbette’s act.  
33

 Syracuse Journal, “Her Muscular Development,” September 1901.  



77 

 

such as the head stand and hanging by the instep, the heel or the neck.”
34

 The solo-trapeze, like 

the flying trapeze, evoked a sense of freedom, though was not meant for performing big flying 

movements. Rather, it lent itself extremely well to sensual posing and gesturing, the elements 

upon which the appeal of Charmion’s act was largely based.  

 In their work on women’s aerial history, Tait and Stoddart argue that gender was 

performed differently by solo-trapeze performers compared to those working on the flying 

trapeze. Flying troupes often consisted of both men and women who executed similar acrobatic 

feats and thus required equal amounts of muscular strength and agility. In combination with the 

distance between audiences in the stands and trapeze flyers high above in the rooftop, gender 

categories could not always be distinguished clearly.
35

 Unlike the female acrobat on a circus 

flying trapeze who could “only signify her feminine identity at the beginning and end of the 

trick, standing barefoot on her toes, one hip forward, her body at an angle, and one arm raised or 

in a backward bend,”
36 

for female solo trapezists like Charmion, the performance of gender and 

sexuality “in the form of feminized static poses” constituted the very essence of the trick.
37

 Her 

act on the static trapeze, especially the undressing part, was thus specifically designed to titillate 

her audiences. By contrast, the primary goal of flying trapeze performances was to successfully 

execute a difficult acrobatic routine, while any possible erotic character harboured by the 

performance was often (though not necessarily) a by-product of the act.  

 In circus and circuslike settings such as the vaudeville theatre, the blurring of gender 

boundaries was clearly permissible. These venues were topsy-turvy spaces that invited audiences 

                                                 
34

 See Antony Hippisley Coxe, A Seat in the Circus (Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1980 (originally 

published in 1951 by Evans Brothers, London, England), 158.  
35

 See Peta Tait, Circus Bodies. Cultural Identity in Aerial Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 2005).  
36

 Peta Tait, “Feminine Free Fall: A Fantasy of Freedom,” Theatre Journal 48 (1) (1996): 29.  
37

 See Helen Stoddart, Rings of Desire: Circus History and Representation (UK: Manchester University Press, 

2000), 175.  

http://webcat2.library.ubc.ca/vwebv/search?searchArg=Circus%20bodies&searchCode=TALL&searchType=1


78 

 

into a realm of spectacle and fantasy. Moreover, as Shteir points out, the act of flying or being 

suspended above the audience on a trapeze “softened the salacious nature of taking off one’s 

clothes in public” because “the androgenous figure of the acrobat seemed closer to a supernatural 

being than a real man or woman.”
38

 Charmion also confused her audiences by combining 

feminine and erotic undressing with muscularity, a characteristic generally associated with 

working class masculinity. Acts like hers were popular because they explicitly stretched the 

boundaries of socially accepted representations of the sexual female body without being seen as 

serious threats to the established gender order.  

Though Charmion’s act played on the fin de siècle fascination with nudity, she did not 

strip entirely naked.
39

 After disrobing she was “revealed in the conventional costume of the 

female acrobat,”
40

 including a leotard and flesh-coloured tights. Although some censors at the 

time argued that Charmion’s acrobat attire was indecent, it was not her revealing bodysuit or her 

daring trapeze acrobatics that seemed to provoke their reactions. The titillating aspect of her act 

stemmed from the process of disrobing, not so much from its result. This became particularly 

clear in 1897 when she was asked to perform in the Astoria Theater in New York for elite 

members of the Society of Musical Arts. After several weeks of negotiation, a reporter from the 

New York Herald wrote that the Society had finally decided that Charmion’s act “would bring 

spice and relief to their confreres.” However, Charmion was asked to modify her act. The 

disrobing part, including the throwing of garters into the audience, was to be discarded and she 

“was simply to show what could be accomplished by [a] woman in the way of muscular 

                                                 
38

 Shteir, Striptease: The Untold Story of the Girlie Show, 52.  
39

 The term “fin de siècle” originally referred to the end of the 19
th

 century and the transition into the 20
th

 in France, 

but is also often used in North American literature to indicate similar transitions in North-America.  
40

 New York Dramatic Mirror, December 25, 1897, 18. 



79 

 

development without losing that symmetry of propriety which is one of woman’s chief 

charms.”
41

  

When Charmion first appeared on stage at this performance, she was entirely enveloped 

in a white opera cloak. This was the moment suprême because the audience had to speculate 

what was hidden under the cloak. Was it a fully clothed Charmion - meaning she would perform 

her disrobing act - or was it ‘just’ Charmion the trapeze performer? “Who could compute or 

interpret the thousands of thoughts and fancies, hopes and fears that were thrilling the people 

before her?”
 42

 When Charmion threw off her cloak, she revealed pink tights, a green bodice, and 

trunks and held a bouquet of roses. A “sentiment of true disappointment pervaded the audience,” 

the Herald reporter wrote, when it became apparent that “the most thrilling portion of 

Charmion’s performance was to be eliminated.”
43

 Though her acrobatics on the trapeze, followed 

by an exhibition of her arm and back muscles seemed to have been well received, there was a 

clear desire to witness Charmion in the process of disrobing, rather than already disrobed.  

With regards to undressing as far as tights and leotard without any skin being revealed, 

Charmion asked, “What harm can be there?”
 44

 Roland Barthes would suggest that disrobing - 

taking clothes off layer by layer - constitutes “a spectacle based on fear.”
45

 Though there was a 

clear desire on the part of the (male) audience to see the disrobed female body, there might also 

be the fear that once this body was revealed, there was nothing left to lust for. Once a body was 

revealed, the tension built up during the disrobing, involving erotic poses and gestures, 

                                                 
41

 New York Herald, “Muscular Arms versus Musical Arts,” January 19, 1898.  
42

 Ibid. 
43

 Ibid. 
44

 Ibid. 
45

 Roland Barthes. Mythologies, Trans. By Annette Lavers (Union Square, New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 84.  



80 

 

disappeared because the female body was now “desexualized.”
46

 The erotic appeal of 

performances like Charmion’s thus lay in the uncertainty, unease, as well as desire that emanated 

from the very undoing of clothing. 

 

A Woman with the Muscles of Sandow
47 

 

 Part of what constituted Charmion’s attraction was her highly developed upper-body 

muscularity, which she displayed while striking daring, often erotic, poses.
48

 “Young women 

who are ambitious to rival their brothers in muscular development,” the New York World 

informed, “would do well to follow the example set by La Petite Charmion” whose “muscles 

stand out like great knots when she strikes a pugilistic attitude.”
49

 Charmion’s most provocative 

pose was probably the one where she flexed both arms over her shoulders and displayed her 

naked back, for this suggested that the front of her body was also naked. Few strongwomen at 

the time displayed this kind of nudity, though a notable exception was trapeze artist Luisita Leers 

who posed in a similar fashion to Charmion during her career in the 1920s and ’30s.  

  The exhibition of muscularity, by means of poses reminiscent of ancient Greco-Roman 

statues, was revived at the end of the ninetieth century by self-proclaimed physical culturist, 

Eugen Sandow. His fascination with sculpting the body brought him fame as an example of a 

perfect and racially superior white male. He organized competitions that sought out perfect 

                                                 
46

 Ibid. As also Showalter has pointed out, “… striptease is based on the logic of the male gaze. … The dancer teases 

the audience as the text teases its readers, with the promise of an ultimate revelation that is infinitely postponed, veil 

after veil, garment after garment is removed, but it is the delay in the stripping that makes it exciting, not the 

stripping itself, because no sooner has one secret been revealed than we lose interest in it and crave another…” 

Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarcy. Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Viking, 1990), 166.   
47

 New York NY World, “A Woman in New York With the Muscles of Sandow,” December 19, 1897.  
48

 See David Chapman and Patricia Vertinsky, Venus with Biceps: A Pictorial History of Muscular Women 

(Vancouver, BC : Arsenal Press, 2010).  
49

 New York NY World, “A Woman in New York With the Muscles of a Sandow,” December 19, 1897. 



81 

 

muscular development in men and so became the founding father of modern-day bodybuilding.
50

 

Supported by scientists, who shared his fascination with the ‘perfect’ male body, Sandow 

maintained a cult following and his posing was seen as an “act of mass self-definition.”
51

 This 

new kind of masculine identity formation, according to Budd, was also a push “against the 

prevailing experience of the machine age,”
52

 in which the body seemed to have lost all its 

significance. It was also an attempt to preserve white male supremacy, which had come under 

attack from immigrants, the working class, African Americans, and the New Woman.
53

  

 Charmion, like many performers at the time, claimed association with the popular 

Sandow to promote her act. The headlines for one of her first performances in 1897 pronounced 

her “a woman in New York with the muscles of Sandow” and added that she had a back and 

biceps like an oak tree and an arm larger than strongman Corbett’s.
54

 According to another 

report, Charmion measured her strength against three strongmen, including Sandow, and 

“showed that she had nearly half as much leg and back power” as him.
55

 It is unlikely that this 

competition actually took place, but it illustrates how Charmion used the popularity of other 

artists to advertise her own act and be regarded as an authority on women’s health and physical 

culture.   

                                                 
50

 Michael Anton Budd, The Sculpture Machine. Physical Culture and Body Politics in the Age of Empire. 

Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Press LTD, 1997, 60-61; Jacqueline Brady, “Is a Hard Woman 

Good to Find? Reconsidering the Modern Amazon Project,” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 2 (3) (2001): 217-18.  
51

 Budd, The Sculpture Machine, 60.  
52

 Ibid., 75.    
53

 Marcy W. Murray. “Strong Women and Cross-dressed Men: Representations of Gender by Circus Performers 

during the Golden Age of the American Circus, 1860-1930,” Bandwagon (May-June 2004): 18. For an extensive 

account of Eugen Sandow’s career and the history of early body building, see David Chapman, Sandow the 

Magnificent. Eugen Sandow and the Beginnings of Body Building (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 

1994). 
54

 New York NY World, “A Woman in New York With the Muscles of a Sandow,” December 19, 1897. For more 

info on James J. Corbett, see Kim Beckwith and Jan Todd, “Requiem for a Strongman: Reassessing the Career of 

Professor Louis Attila,” Iron Game History 7 (2-3) (2002): 42-55.  
55

 Glens Falls Morning Star, Tuesday, May 10, 1898, 2. 



82 

 

 

Image 2: Charmion flexing her right bicep. Courtesy of 

the Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public 

Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and 

Tilden Foundations. 

 

 Charmion was not the only ‘female Sandow’ at the time, nor the strongest. Katie 

Sandwina, with her six-foot height, 200-pound weight, and extraordinary feats of strength, also 

seemed to defy traditional definitions of femininity. She was praised as “Germany’s Beautiful 

Herculean Venus” and was often credited with the status of “the most perfect female figure ever 



83 

 

seen.”
56

 Strong and beautiful performers who gained popularity in the public sphere at this time, 

like Sandwina and Charmion, were directly linked with important social movements of the day, 

as Todd points out. These included, especially, eugenics, women’s suffrage, physical culture and 

“New Womanhood.”
 57

 Like Sandow, described by eugenicists as a prime specimen of a superior 

race, Charmion and Sandwina were frequently referred to as examples of perfect female health 

and beauty and represented the ‘New Woman.’  

 The New Woman of the theatre and circus was not usually directly associated with any 

kind of radical women’s movement. According to Glenn, however, female performers between 

1880 and 1910 constituted a kind of “proto feminist vanguard.” Before the advent of organized 

women’s movements, performers like Charmion played crucial roles in women’s demands for 

the right to sexual expressiveness and autonomy over their bodies and identities. Though there 

may not have been a widely shared set of ideological values or a specific political agenda among 

these performers, their unconventional acts laid the groundwork for feminism even before the 

term was coined.
58

   

Both on- and off-stage, Charmion advocated female agency by encouraging women to be 

more physically active:  

Every woman ought to exercise on getting up in the morning. Take a drink of cold 

water, then exercise with small dumbbells – if you have none, take flatirons – 

going through motions with arms up and down, bolding the weights out of arm’s 

length, etc.: keep this up for ten minutes. Be sure to take a little walk each day in 

the fresh air. If you stay indoors any length of time, say two days, without going 

out, as some women do, you will become melancholy. Remember that exercise 

                                                 
56

 Jan Todd, Reconsidering the Career of Katie Sandwina: Germany's Herculean Venus – NASSH proceedings 2007, 

64 (2 pages).  
57

 Jan Todd, “Center Ring: Katie Sandwina and the Construction of Celebrity,” Iron Game History 10 (1) 

(November 2007): 6.  
58

 Glenn, Female Spectacle, 4, 6. 



84 

 

also works on the mind and really makes you enjoy life. You will never find an 

athlete, man or woman, nervous.
59

 

 

To enable free movement of the body, she also advised women not to wear corsets or long 

skirts.
60

 

 

Image 3: Charmion posing provocatively 

without corset, circa 1898. Courtesy of the 

Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York 

Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, 

Lenox and Tilden Foundations. 

                                                 
59

 Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, “The Drama: Synopsis,” Sunday, March 20, 1904; See also: Marion Pilot, 

“Woman’s Department, “Charmion Rules,” October 27, 1904. According to the Utica Sunday Tribune, Charmion 

even wrote a book for women on “how to enjoy life by taking simple exercises,” which, according to the report, 

attained “an immense sale” and led to the adoption of her system in many leading schools and colleges for women 

around 1906. No information on this book has surfaced, however, and it may very well be that Charmion made it up 

as part of her stage biography. Utica Sunday Tribune, “Charmion, The Perfect Woman at the Orpheum this Week,” 

November 23, 1906. 
60

 Sunday World, “She Hangs by Her Heel in Mid-air,” January 9, 1989. 



85 

 

 Links between Charmion’s act and phenomena such as physical culture and dress reform 

were clearly influenced by physical culture proponents and health reformers such as Bernarr 

Macfadden. Macfadden published a large number of articles in his Physical Culture Magazine.
61

 

In these articles, he strongly advocated against the corset and for gender equality through 

physical activity.
62

 “[T]here should be but very slight differences between the strength of man 

and woman,” and “the proverbial feminine weakness is simply the result of growing into 

womanhood eased by the terrible corset,” he claimed. He also frequently used female acrobats, 

including trapeze performers, to illustrate the capacity of women to be as strong as men - while 

maintaining femininity. About the Moulier sisters trapeze duo, who, like Charmion, also 

performed in New York around 1900, he said: “These sisters are but mere girls in age, and still 

they perform feats equal and even superior to some of the best male athletes…”
63

 

Macfadden and Charmion thus promoted similar ideas: women’s liberation from 

restrictive clothing, women’s ability to develop muscular strength like men, and the benefits of 

such ideas for their health and well-being. Whether or not Charmion’s strategies to popularize 

these ideas were successful remains questionable. Unlike Sandow, whose promotion of the 

muscular male body was perceived necessary for the preservation of family values, nation, and 

empire in a time of social anxieties around the “unman,”
64

 strongwomen in vaudeville were often 

perceived to wear their bodies in “the wrong way”
 65 

and were taken less seriously. Whereas the 

                                                 
61

 By 1901 the magazine had reached a circulation of 150,000. Endres, Kathleen L. “The Feminism of Bernarr 

Macfadden: Physical Culture Magazine and the Empowerment of Women,” Media History Monographs 13 (2) 

(2011): 4; See also Allen Guttmann, Women’s  ports. A History (Columbia University Press: New York, 1991), 98. 
62

 See Endres, “The Feminism of Bernarr Macfadden.” 
63

 Bernarr A. Macfadden, “Strong, Beautiful Bodies for Girls and Young Women,” Physical Culture, June 1900. See 

also Guttmann, Women’s  ports, 98.  
64

 Budd, The Sculpture Machine, 61, 79.  
65

 Ibid., 67; See also Murray, “Strong Women and Cross-dressed Men,” 19.  



86 

 

muscular male body such as Sandow’s was perceived as ‘in control,’ the muscular and erotic 

female performer signified the opposite: she was out of her place and her body out of control.  

One of the technologies that both enhanced and restricted a woman’s agency around the 

turn of the twentieth century was the camera - or the “sculpture machine,” as Budd puts it.
66

 

Muscular and/or erotic male and female bodies could now be “mass produced, mass marketed, 

and mass distributed.”
 67

 Like Sandow, whose image could be found in various magazines, on 

postcards, and on posters, Charmion took advantage of the developing photography industry and 

distributed postcards and pins with images of herself flexing her muscles or striking sensual 

poses on the trapeze. 

 

To View and Be Viewed 

The developing photography, print, and cinema industries at this time made it both 

possible and much simpler for managers and performers to promote acts through the widespread 

distribution of alluring images. Although advertising through photographic and cinematographic 

representations seemed effective ways to entice potential spectators, it also reinforced ideas 

about the female body as a sexual object. In the case of photography, Sontag has pointed out that 

it “turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.”
68

 Similarly, Allen suggests that 

media representations around the turn of the twentieth century - be they postcards, mutoscopes, 

stereo viewers, or motion pictures - “reduced the subject of feminine sexual spectacle to a tiny 

icon, which could be bought or collected,”
69

 and thus fetishized. In the case of the mutoscope 

                                                 
66

 Budd, The Sculpture Machine, 58. 
67

 Brady, “Is a Hard Woman Good to Find?,” 217.  
68

 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York, London: Anchor Books Doubleday, 1973, 1974, 1977, 1990), 14.  
69

 Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 270.  



87 

 

(like a View-master), even the movement of a female character could be controlled by the 

spectator, who could decide the speed at which the cards flipped by.
70

  

The increasing interest in viewing moving bodies at the fin de siècle was initiated by 

inventors and scientists who were fascinated with measuring various aspects of the human body, 

including the mechanisms of movement. Their studies, scientific at first, gave rise to the 

development of cinematography, a technology that would later become popular and 

commercialized, eventually taking over the role of vaudeville as the most widespread 

entertainment medium. During the first years of cinematography’s development, however, 

vaudeville theatres played important roles in bringing cinema to the masses. Theatre managers 

used this new and fascinating technology of film to attract spectators, while continuing to 

provide staged entertainment. The synergy of vaudeville and the invention of cinematography 

permitted curious audiences to view moving bodies on display: either on stage, through 

‘peepholes,’ or on the big screen.  

Silent movies like Trapeze Disrobing Act followed earlier experiments of inventors and 

scientists that captured and registered the movements of animals and humans through sequencing 

drawings and photographs. Prominent figures in these pioneering works were French scientist 

Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904) and his contemporary, Anglo-American photographer 

Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904). Though Marey seemed to approach his experiments 

primarily from a scientific angle, Muybridge was clearly more interested in the artistic value of 

bodies in motion, putting emphasis on narrative, costume, décor, and thus mise-en-scène.
71

 

While Marey almost exclusively used male characters in his work, Muybridge photographed the 

                                                 
70

 Ibid., 270-71.  
71

 Mary Ann Doane, “Technology and Sexual Difference: Apocalyptic Scenarios at Two “Fins de Siècle,” 

Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 9 (2) (1998): 10-11 



88 

 

moving bodies of both men and women, often both entirely unclad. However, clear distinctions 

between the depictions of each gender can be observed.  

In Muybridge’s work, as Allen suggests, male movement is represented in terms of 

athleticism or work, while female movement is presented as a sexual spectacle.
72

 Indeed, 

Muybridge’s depictions of men often involved athletic feats (e.g. boxing, fencing, jumping, and 

running) without explicit contextualization. Depictions of women, on the other hand, emphasized 

gracefulness and/or were often set in a ‘domestic’ framework that involved being, or becoming, 

naked. In one sequence of photographs, for example, Muybridge depicts two naked women 

taking a bath (1884-85).
73

 In another one, a naked woman goes to bed (1887),
74

 and a final series 

captures two naked women dancing.
75

 The difference between the depictions of men and women, 

in Berger’s view, is that “men act and women appear.” Men signify action and are the ones who 

watch. Women are the surveilled, the ones being observed by a male gaze.
76 

 

 Muybridge was not the only expert whose work catered to a primarily male desire to 

view sexualized displays of (fe)male bodies. In North America, Edisons’ Kinetograph 

Department, founded in 1894, as well as William Kennedy Dickson’s (1860 –1935) Mutoscope 

and Biograph Company, established in 1895, produced a large number of short, titillating films. 

Before these movies appeared on the big screen, they could be viewed through kinetoscopes or 

peepholes, which Edison had installed in cities across America.
77

 In concert with other smaller 

                                                 
72

 Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 263. 
73

 See http://www.masters-of-photography.com/M/muybridge/muybridge_bucket_of_water_full.html [accessed June 

30, 2013]. 
74

 See http://images.wellcome.ac.uk/indexplus/image/V0048662ET.html [accessed June 30, 2013]. 
75

 See http://beingsakin.wordpress.com/2011/03/26/if-you-dance-with-me/ [accessed June 30, 2013]. 
76

 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin books, 1972), 47. Italics are his. 
77

 See, Smithsonian Institution, “Dancing in the Dark,” Smithsonian Magazine, March 2006. Retrieved from 

http://web.archive.org/web/20061111131341/http://www.smithsonianmag.com/issues/2006/march/presence.htm 

[accessed June 5, 2012]; Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 265.  

http://www.masters-of-photography.com/M/muybridge/muybridge_bucket_of_water_full.html
http://images.wellcome.ac.uk/indexplus/image/V0048662ET.html
http://beingsakin.wordpress.com/2011/03/26/if-you-dance-with-me/
http://web.archive.org/web/20061111131341/http:/www.smithsonianmag.com/issues/2006/march/presence.htm


89 

 

movie companies in North America and bigger ones in Europe,
78

 Edison turned moving bodies 

into spectacles and movie making into a commercial endeavour.
79

 

 It was thus no coincidence that Charmion’s vaudeville act became the subject of one of 

Edison’s films. Her act fed the interest of audiences in sexual spectacle, and Edison opened one 

of his first kinetoscope parlours in close proximity to Koster and Bial’s theatre in New York, 

where Charmion performed on a frequent basis. The cross-pollination between vaudeville and 

cinema, both depicting erotic bodies in motion, according to Musser, had already been initiated 

in 1894 when Edison recruited bodybuilder Eugen Sandow to pose with his muscles before the 

camera.
80 

The first woman to appear in Edison’s films was Spanish dancer Carmencita (1894).
81 

Like Sandow and Charmion, Carmencita was a popular performer at Koster and Bial’s theatre 

and her “intense sexuality,”
82

 evoked by her flamboyant dancing, made her an interesting film 

character.  

 Sandow (1894), Carmencita (1894) and Trapeze Disrobing Act (1901), along with other 

movies produced by Edison and the Mutoscope and Biograph Company, could be categorized, 

according to Gunning, as “the cinema of attractions.”
83 

The term refers to early films produced 

                                                 
78

 George Méliès, the Lumière and Pathé brothers in France; Robert W. Paul, James Williamson, G.A. Smith and 

Cecil Hepworth in England.  
79

 See, Smithsonian Institution, “Dancing in the Dark;” Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 265.  
80

 Charles Musser, “At the Beginning. Motion Picture Production, Representation and Ideology at the Edison and 

Lumière Companies,” in The Silent Cinema Reader, ed. Lee Grieveson and Peter Krämer, 15-30 (London and New 

York: Taylor and Francis, 2004), 19-20; Thomas Edison, Sandow, 1894, 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PfqtorMruo [accessed June 30, 2013]. 
81

 Thomas Edison, Carmencita (1894), see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-15jwb1ZTMA [accessed June 30, 

2013]. 
82

 Musser, “At the Beginning. Motion Picture Production,” 22. 
83

 Tom Gunning, “ “Now you see it, now you don’t,” The Temporality of the Cinema of Attractions,” In The Silent 

Cinema Reader, ed. Lee Grieveson and Peter Krämer, 41-50 (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 42. This 

term offers a historical concept of film spectatorship which takes its cue from modes of fascination prevalent in 

early cinema, feeding on attractions such as the magical and illusionist power of filmic representation, its kinetic and 

temporal manipulations (not yet subordinated to character movement and the chronological momentum of linear 

narrative) and, above all, an openly exhibitionist tendency epitomized by the recurring look of actors at the camera. 

With the standardization of the narrative film (in the U.S. around 1906-07) such “primitive” attractions were 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W._Paul
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Williamson,_film_pioneer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Albert_Smith_%28inventor%29
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PfqtorMruo


90 

 

between 1893 and 1908, whose sole purpose was “to display,” and in some cases “to shock,” 

rather than to tell a story.
84 

Like Edison’s Sandow and Carmencita, which present scenes without 

storylines and put emphasis on the body as spectacle,
85 

Trapeze Disrobing Act also shows a 

series of actions and poses that are meant to titillate and shock, while lacking a clear narrative 

structure. As Gunning points out, movies like Trapeze Disrobing Act invoked “the temporality of 

surprise, shock and trauma, the sudden rupture of stability by the irruption of transformation or 

the curtailing of erotic promise.”
86 

 

 How did meanings associated with Charmion’s performance on stage possibly differ 

from those associated with her performance on the screen, and what may the explosion of media 

images around the turn of the twentieth century have meant in terms of women’s agency more 

broadly? German literary critic Walter Benjamin believed that the introduction of photography 

and cinema at this time led to “a crisis of theater” and authenticity.
87 

He meant that, while staged 

performance produced direct contact between performer and audience, cinema caused a temporal 

incongruence between the two. The camera made the performer and her/his image “separable, 

transportable,”
88 

leaving her/him without any kind of interaction with the audience or control 

over its reactions.  

 Staged performances such as Charmion’s relied very much on interactions between 

performer and audience. Charmion herself kept up “a running talk” while doing her tricks and 

                                                                                                                                                             
systematically suppressed – if not pressed into service – by narrative strategies of viewer absorption and 

identification. Rather than disappear, Gunning contends, the cinema of attraction continued “underground,” both in 

certain avant-garde film practices and as a component of particular genres (e.g. the musical). Miriam Hansen, 

“Benjamin, Cinema and Experience, “The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology,” New German Critique 40, 

Special Issue on Weimar Film Theory (1987): 180.  
84

 Gunning, “ “Now you see it, now you don’t,” 42, 49.  
85

 Musser, “At the Beginning,” 20. 
86

 Gunning, “ “Now you see it, now you don’t,” 49.  
87

 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968 (originally published in 1955)), 231.  
88

 Ibid., 233.   



91 

 

with her “peculiar chirpy voice” she held “conversations with two or three people in the audience 

all the time.”
89 

She made direct contact with her spectators and seemed to verbally guide them 

through her performance. From short interviews in a number of newspapers, it becomes clear 

that Charmion intentionally used the stage as a platform to convey her beliefs on what the female 

body should look like and how women should aspire to be physical active, have a balanced diet, 

and remove clothing that would hamper free movement.  

The particular interaction between performer and spectator that seemed so crucial to 

Charmion’s performance was absent in Trapeze Disrobing Act. Not only did the silent movie 

leave the interpretation of her act entirely up to her audience, it also “allowed for a view of the 

woman’s body whereby even if she returned the spectator’s gaze, it would always be 

incommensurable with the spectator’s.”
90

 Referring to female dancers in the theatre, Allen 

suggests that the body of the performer and the gaze of the spectator, though separated by the 

footlights and their respective roles, occupied the same space, the same time, and the same 

materiality. In a photographic or cinematographic image, however, the female performer’s 

“returning gaze ha[d] less power to unsettle since the gulf that separated the displayed woman 

from the man who looked at her was an unbridgeable, material gulf.”
91

 Indeed, while 

photographic and cinematographic representations of female performers may have made the 

female body more visible to the public, such images took away, or at least changed, the relative 

agency that emanated from these women’s original performances.
92

 The introduction of cinema 

                                                 
89

 Dash, “Hammerstein’s,” Variety, 1909.  
90

 Lauren Rabinovitz, For the Love of Pleasure. Women, Movies and Culture in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (New 

Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 36.  
91

 Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 271.  
92

 Discussion exists about whether or not the early movies such as Trapeze Disrobing Act were voyeuristic, 

exhibitionist or both. According to Gunning, they were more exhibitionist than voyeuristic because the protagonist 

was fully aware of her audience and made eye contact with the camera on several occasions. Nevertheless, as 



92 

 

at this time thus intensified the divide between women pushing the boundaries as agents of their 

own sexuality and a movie industry that tried to capitalize on the female body as a sexual object.  

Rabinovitz argues that Trapeze Disrobing Act was unlike some of Edison’s other first 

silent movies in which women took the central role. In his movie What Happened on Twenty-

third Street, New York (1901), for example, a woman is caught by surprise when she walks over 

an air vent that lifts her skirt to the amusement of some male onlookers. Unlike the action in 

Edison’s Trapeze Disrobing Act, where Charmion makes eye contact with her audience 

(including the enthusiastic men on the balcony to her right and the camera), the woman in What 

Happened on Twenty-third Street is depicted as naïve and unaware of the public gaze. 

Rabinovitz observes that Charmion’s  

inscribed look back at the camera suggests a tacit contract between her and both 

real and implied spectators, an agreement to her status as looked-at subject. …  

Her movements, her stripping of clothes as she reveals more of her body, her 

athletic prowess on the swing makes her a different kind of subject [from the 

woman
 
who is featured in What Happened on Twenty-third Street].

93
  

 

Swinging Between Freedom and Constraint 

 As the comparison between Trapeze Disrobing Act and What Happened on Twenty-Third 

Street indicates, women’s increased visibility at the turn of the twentieth century can 

simultaneously be read as liberating and restricting. On the one hand, performers like Charmion 

challenged Victorian notions of femininity and the female body and encouraged women’s freer 

bodily movement, expression, and display. On the other hand, the ways in which performers like 

Charmion marketed their stage identities by making use of new visual technologies contributed 

                                                                                                                                                             
Musser points out, despite the film’s seeming exhibitionist character, the two men on the balcony in Trapeze 

Disrobing Act “authorized the film spectators’ voyeurism.” See Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon. Edwin S. 

Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 179. 
93

 Rabinovitz, For the Love of Pleasure, 30.  



93 

 

to a continued objectification of the female body as a sexual commodity. So while “the female 

body became the visual trope of the period’s new mass culture identities,”
94

 it came at a cost. As 

Phelan notes, “[v]isibility is a trap, it summons surveillance and the law; it provokes voyeurism, 

fetishism, the colonial/imperial appetite for possession.”
95

 Moreover, normalization of the 

display of female nudity and sexuality represented by ‘perfectly shaped’ vaudeville performers, 

also increased the desire and seeming requirement for other women to live up to such standards. 

Charmion, for example, claimed that “her figure was within reach… and therefore ordinary 

women might be expected to have ‘perfect’ figures as well.”
96

 

Regardless of whether or not performances like Charmion’s at the time were read as 

liberating or restricting, they helped question and challenge traditional notions of the (Victorian) 

female body as passive, weak, and physically unfit. At a time when fear was simmering that 

provocative performances by women (or performances by women tout court) “had the capacity 

to eradicate the boundaries between classes and genders, instigating political and sexual 

anarchy,”
97

 Charmion played a pioneering role. And though female transgressors like her may 

not, at first sight, have been symbols able to move masses of women to oppose patriarchal 

values, at least they could show, Davis has noted, “the good that could be done by the woman 

out of her place,” and “had the potential to inspire a few females to exceptional action and 

feminists to reflection about the capacities of women….”
98

 

                                                 
94

 Hindson, Female Performance Practice, 42.  
95

 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked. The Politics of Performance (London & New York: Routledge, 1996), 6-7.    
96

 Quoted in Erdman, Blue Vaudeville, 117.  
97

 Houchin, Censorship of the American Theatre, 4. 
98

 Natalie, Zemon Davis, “Women on Top,” Society and Culture in Early Modern France: 

Eight Essays, 124-51 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975), 133.  



94 

 

Chapter IV: Le Numéro Barbette: Destabilizing Gender on the High Wire, the Rings and 

the Flying Trapeze 

…ne  ’o b iez pas, no s sommes dans cette   mi re magiq e d  théâtre, dans 

cette boite à ma ices où  e vrai n’a p  s co rs, o   e nat re  n’a p  s a c ne 

va e r, où  es petites tai  es s’a  ongent,  es ha tes stat res rapetissent, où des 

tours de cartes et de passe-passe, dont le public ne soupçonne pas la difficulté, 

parviennent seuls à tenir le coup. 

 

Jean Cocteau, “Le Numéro Barbette, ”
 
1926.

1
 

 

Don’t forget, we are in the magic light of the theatre, in this trick factory where 

truth has no currency, where anything natural has no value, where the short are 

made tall and the tall short, where the only things that convince us are card 

tricks and sleights of hand of a difficulty unexpected by the audience.
2
 

 

 In the fall of 1923, Barbette took Parisian theaters by storm with a clever though 

provocative amalgamation of trapeze artistry and female impersonation. Standing atop a staircase 

with a blonde wig, fashionable dress and large hat, his body adorned with feathers and 

gemstones, Barbette opened his act. With feminine gestures he walked down the stairs and 

balanced on the high wire on the tips of his ballet shoes. He descended the wire, lay down on a 

sofa and slowly started to take off pieces of clothing – one at a time. When revealed in tight 

shorts and a tiny brassiere, he performed a routine on the rings and the trapeze. After several 

bows and rounds of applause, Barbette took off his wig, while flexing his muscles and gesturing 

in masculine ways. Spectators who saw his act for the first time were often very surprised, some 

relieved and others offended.
3
 

 Barbette, born Vander Clyde in 1904 in Round Rock, Texas had never dared to dream of 

the spectacular success his act would become in Paris and other places in Europe during the 

                                                 
1
 Jean Cocteau, “Le Numéro Barbette, ” Extrait de la Nouvelle Revue Française, July 1st (1926): 35-36. 

2
 Translation by Francis Steegmuller, Cocteau A Biography (Boston, Toronto: Little, Brown and Company (1970): 

366. 
3
 See also Lydia Crowson, “Cocteau and le Numéro Barbette,” Modern Drama 19 (1) (1976): 80. 



95 

 

interwar years - between 1923 and 1938 to be precise. When he presented his act to audiences in 

several American cities at the start of his career, his performance did not catch on as it would 

later on in the ‘City of Light.’ Though Barbette, who had learned his aerial skills and his female 

impersonation while on the American circus circuit, was an accomplished and skillful acrobat, to 

a large extent he owed his fame to French poet and cinematographer, Jean Cocteau. Cocteau, a 

controversial figure, both because of his close connection with surrealist art and his open 

homosexuality, became enamoured with Barbette as soon as he laid eyes on him. To his friends, 

including artists, poets and literary critics, he raved about Barbette’s beauty and creative 

deceptions. “Your great loss for 1923 has been Barbette – a terrific act at the Casino de Paris,” 

Jean Cocteau wrote to his friend and artist Valentine Hugo. “Barbette is a young American who 

performs on the trapeze dressed as a woman. Ten unforgettable minutes. … We all found him an 

absolute knockout.”
4
 In his poetic essay Le Numéro Barbette, published in 1926, Cocteau would 

immortalize Barbette while describing his own fears and desires that the performance inspired.   

It was not Barbette’s acrobatic skills that intrigued Cocteau, it was, suggests Tait, his 

performing body’s physical suspension on the trapeze that echoed a form of identity suspension.
5
 

Indeed, Barbette’s mystery seemed to lie in his aerial transformation from woman to man during 

which the presumably distinct categories of masculinity and femininity became confounded. 

Barbette flew in-between genders and “treated her body as an elaborate screen onto which the 

beholder could project his or her own assumptions, fantasies, and desires.”
6
 

                                                 
4
 Steegmuller, Cocteau: A Biography, 312.  

5
 Peta Tait, Circus Bodies. Cultural Identity in Aerial Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 75. 

6
 Amy Lyford, “The Lessons of Barbette. Surrealism, Fascism, and the Politics of Sexual Metamorphosis,” in 

Surrealist Masculinities. Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Post-World War I Reconstruction France, 165-183 

(Berkley: University of California Press, 2007), 174. 

http://webcat2.library.ubc.ca/vwebv/search?searchArg=Tait,%20Peta,&searchCode=NAME&searchType=4
http://webcat2.library.ubc.ca/vwebv/search?searchArg=Circus%20bodies&searchCode=TALL&searchType=1


96 

 

 Barbette’s act in interwar France was timely. The destructive results of World War I, 

especially with regard to the large numbers of physically and psychologically wounded soldiers, 

had left the country with deep concerns about the degeneration of the male body and the nation 

as a whole. The country’s anticipated ‘return to order’ after the war did not go without 

opposition from liberal thinkers, such as Jean Cocteau and surrealist inspired artists like Man 

Ray and Drieu La Rochelle - to name a few - who saw in the postwar chaos opportunities for the 

discussion and/or establishment of un(der)explored gender relations. Though gender issues were 

at the heart of many postwar debates and anxieties in France, their interrogation took place less 

in public debates than in the writings, works of art and performances of these so-called radical 

individuals like Cocteau and his entourage.
7
 As Chadwick and Latimer suggest, visual culture 

and performance in interwar France were “spheres of empowerment for some social subjects, 

spheres of subversion for others.” Performances nonetheless, provided spaces in which gender 

and sexuality could be refigured and from which new contracts with society could be 

negotiated.
8
 

The interwar culture in France, though fraught with worries about the degeneration of 

nation and race, has often been presented as a place where liberal arts, culture and performance 

flourished, where theaters and circuses provided ample room for performers from all over the 

world, and for performances so suggestive they would have been banned elsewhere. African 

                                                 
7
 See analogous: Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes. Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917-

1927 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994): 8, 15. She writes: “…the privileging of gender 

issues in the postwar confrontation with change has its historical roots in the war experience itself. The blurring of 

conventional gender roles was one of the most commented on of the war’s effects;” and on page 15: “….because 

returning soldiers had trouble communicating openly or directly what they had seen and felt, and because the French 

often wanted to ignore the fundamental questions concerning the war’s meaning, more oblique or ‘disguised’ forms 

of symbolic expression such as novels became a popular outlet for debate.” 
8
 Whitney Chadwick and Tirza True Latimer, “Introduction,” in The Modern Woman Revisited. Paris Between the 

Wars, ed. Whitney Chadwick and Tirza True Latimer, xiii-xxiv (New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers 

University Press, 2003), xviii. 



97 

 

American Josephine Baker’s erotic dancing and display of nudity was one such example and 

Barbette himself was certainly another one.
9
 One way of interpreting this “frenzied hedonism” so 

typical of postwar France, Roberts suggests, was to view it as “a response to the trauma of the 

First World War and the dramatic changes that accompanied it.”
10

  

 Barbette’s provocative act offers a useful case for examining social anxieties about gender, 

masculinity and (homo)sexuality in interwar France. His performance contributed to debates 

about the constructedness of gender and was indicative of the tensions of a postwar culture that 

wanted to ‘return to order.’ Like Charmion, who performed provocative striptease in mid-air on a 

trapeze in vaudeville theaters, the aesthetic of suspension and flying in combination with the 

“magic light of theater”
11

 made Barbette’s act not only permissible, but also very popular. In 

Barbette’s case, flying and being suspended in the air provided a metaphor for a liminal space 

where no boundaries existed, where ‘things were possible.’  

  

Barbette Beginnings 

Much of what we know about Barbette, the successes he enjoyed and the tragic end of his 

career, is thanks to Francis Steegmuller who interviewed Barbette in Texas, about ten years 

before the artist took his own life in 1973. Clearly marked with the “wounds of his devotion to 

                                                 
9
 See for example Karen C.C. Dalton and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Josephine Baker and Paul Colin: African 

American Dance Seen through Parisian Eyes,” Critical Inquiry 24 (4) (1998): 903-34. See also Elisabeth Ezra, “A 

Colonial Princess. Josephine Baker’s French Films,” in The Colonial Unconscious. Race and Culture in Interwar 

France (Ithaca and London, 2000), 97-128. 
10

 Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes, 1.  
11

 I here refer to Cocteau’s quote at the start of this chapter. See Cocteau, “Le Numéro Barbette,” 35.  



98 

 

his art,”
12

 referring to both the physical and emotional pains that were tormenting him, Barbette 

told Steegmuller his story.  

His earliest acrobatic exercise, Barbette recounted, was carried out on a stretched out, 

galvanized, iron clothesline in his mother’s backyard in Round Rock, Texas. Once finished high 

school at fourteen years of age he picked cotton to earn money and shortly after joined the 

“Alferetta Sisters World-Famous Aerial Queens”
 
circus act.

13
 One of the sisters had died and 

when a replacement was sought, Barbette responded to the ad and agreed to perform as a female 

aerialist.
14

 It was certainly not unusual for young men to perform as women during aerial circus 

acts. As Tait points out, “[t]he cross-dressing of young males with upper-body strength for 

competitive advantage made the aerial act appear impressive ‘for a woman’, and ensured its hire 

over other male acts. … There was little advantage for females to secretly cross-dress, and acts 

of female-to-male cross-dressing in circus were far rarer than in theater.”
15

 

 Around 1914, after about two years performing with the Alferetta Sisters, Barbette joined 

‘Erford’s Whirling Sensation,’ an act consisting of three people hanging by their teeth on a 

revolving apparatus and wearing large butterfly wings.
16

 During one of these acts Barbette broke 

four of his teeth and fell from a height, otherwise without major consequences.
17

 In his early 

twenties be began to develop his own act. The piece was a combination of skills he had learned 

during his training in circus, including aerial acrobatics and cross-dressing, though was designed 

to be performed in a theater-setting. It was then that he adopted the name “Barbette,” which 

                                                 
12

 Francis Steegmuller, Interview with Barbette, in Man Ray, Jean Cocteau and Francis Steegmuller, Le Numéro 

Barbette (Paris: Jacques Damase, 1980), 74. 
13

 Announcement in Billboard, “Alferetta Sisters World’s Famous Aerial Queens,” Jan 27, 1917.  
14

 Steegmuller, Interview with Barbette, 62. 
15

 Tait, Circus Bodies, 67-68. 
16

 Steegmuller, Interview with Barbette, 64. 
17

 See Georges-Michel, “Psychologie de Barbette,” around 1929. Retrieved from Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 

Paris, 8-RO-16929. 



99 

 

sounded like a feminized version of the French word for beard, barbe, and was possibly intended 

to hint at his gender ambiguous performance.
18

 Barbette himself said that his lucky choice of 

name made French people think of him as one of themselves.
19

  

 It was around 1919 that Barbette started to present his solo-act to audiences in the United 

States. He was received with mixed commentaries. In response to his performance in Keith’s 

theater in Boston in December 1919, one show critic wrote that “[m]uch of the possible worth is 

lost because he evidently considers it necessary to use such bulk of makeup to disguise his 

masculine features. On the wire he does not do anything much but his trapeze work is a bit 

better.”
20

A reporter in Variety had more praise for the performer and called him a “big time 

opener.”
21

 From these newspaper excerpts it also becomes clear that, at least in the beginning of 

his career, Barbette sometimes executed an ‘iron jaw dervish whirl’
22

 before unmasking his male 

identity. He seemed to have omitted this part later on,
23

 possibly because he no longer deemed 

this dangerous and physically demanding feat necessary for the success of his act.  

 At the end of 1922, Barbette disappeared from the circus scene in the United States until 

about 1927, and travelled to Europe with William Morris as his agent.
24

 After performing in 

England, he went to Paris in the fall of 1923,
25

 reportedly with “twenty-five trunks of costumes, 

                                                 
18

 Lyford, “The Lessons of Barbette,” 165. 
19

 Steegmuller. Interview with Barbette, 66.  
20

 Len Libbey, “Show Reviews, Keith’s Boston,” Variety, December 1919, 18.  
21

 Abel, “New Acts and Show Reviews,” Variety 1919, 18.  
22

 In this act he would hang by his teeth from a revolving apparatus (like the one with Erford) and spin or ‘whirl’ 

around, probably quite fast.  
23

 Abel, “New Acts and Show Reviews,” Variety 1919, 18.  
24

 Joe E. Jeffreys, “Barbette: That Daring Young [Wo]Man on the Flying Trapeze,” in Art, Glitter, and Glitz. 

Mainstream Playwrights and Popular Theatre in 1920s America, ed. Arthur Gewirtz and James J. Kolb (Westport, 

Connecticut and London: Praeger, 2004), 206. 
25

 Interview Steegmuller, 64; David Lewis Hammarstrom, Behind the Big Top (Cranbury, New Jersey: A.S. Barnes 

and Co., Inc., 1980), 34. 



100 

 

scenery, and cosmetics for a dazzling female impersonation on the single trapeze…”
26

 Over the 

years, Barbette would reveal himself as a meticulous and perfectionist performer, always arriving 

two to three hours before his performance to put on his make-up and check his apparatus.  

 Anton Dolin, a ballet dancer with the Ballets Russes and Barbette’s friend in Paris recounts 

how Barbette whitened his whole torso with a thick cream that was specifically prepared for him. 

He also whitened his hands and pink-tinted his nails. In line with the popular art of ‘plastic 

posing’ or the tableaux vivants performers as addressed in the previous chapter,
27

 whitening 

one’s body to invoke the image of a Greco-Roman body or statue, was deemed more artistic. No 

matter how many times a day Barbette appeared, after every performance he cleaned off his 

white layer and put it on again for the next show. His tights were specially woven for him in 

Paris and he never wore the same pair twice in an evening. He sent his blond wig to the hair-

dresser after every performance so it could be dressed for the next day. At least fifteen minutes 

before his act, he would be on the stage to test the trapeze, strengthening the steel supports of the 

wire rope, “his pink ballet shoes protected by large straw sandals, his hands encased in large 

chamois gloves.”
28

 

 

                                                 
26

 Hammarstrom, Behind the Big Top, 35.  
27

 See Andrew L. Erdman, Blue Vaudeville: Sex, Morals and the Mass Marketing of Amusement, 1895-1915 

(Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2004), 5. See also Rachel Shteir, Striptease: The Untold Story of the Girlie Show 

(New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004), 15. 
28

 Anton Dolin, Ballet Go Round (London: Michael Joseph LTD, 1938), 304.  



101 

 

 

Image 4: Barbette prepares for his act. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale 

de France. 



102 

 

Paris Was the Experience…
29

 

 “I felt that I’d found my city,” Barbette told Steegmuller, describing his arrival in Paris. At 

the theater, as opposed to the circus, “I could tell that the audience appreciated all the little 

refinements I’d worked so hard on” and soon “the most wonderful people began to come around 

to my dressing room.”
30

 With the help of wealthy American expatriates who took him under their 

wings, he was introduced to other influential people, including poet Jean Cocteau and his artistic 

colleagues Raymond Radiguet, Man Ray, George Geffroy and Marie-Laure de Noailles, the 

latter, one of the most controversial and influential patrons of arts of the twentieth century. The 

writers, painters, composer and other artists he met, Barbette said, “sensed from seeing my act 

that we were artists together…”
31

 

 However it was Jean Cocteau’s praise and influential essay Le Numéro Barbette, published 

in La Nouvelle Revue Française in 1926 that gave Barbette’s performance the attention it 

received. Through his essay in which he praises Barbette for the beauty and ingenuity of his act, 

Cocteau, quite literally, ‘lifted’ Barbette’s performance to a level of artistry the aerialist himself 

had never dared to dream of. Barbette, who early on in his career said he thought of himself as a 

“female impersonator, and nothing more,”
32

 later admitted that Cocteau saw more in his act than 

he had realized there was himself…
33

 

 

                                                 
29

 Steegmuller, interview with Barbette, 66.   
30

 Ibid, 64. 
31

 Ibid., 64, 66.   
32

 René Bizet, “Le Double Visage. Dans La Loge de Barbette,” Candide, Jan 14, 1926. Retrieved from Bibliothèque 

Nationale de France, Paris, 8-RO-16929. Original words : “Je ne comprends pas pourquoi on met devant mon nom 

très souvent, sure les affiches, un point d’interrogation. Je me défends de la façon la plus absolue de faire quoique ce 

soit d’équivoque. Je suis un imitateur de femme. un point c’est tout… ” 
33

 Steegmuller, Interview with Barbette, 66.  



103 

 

Des Gens Ne Voient Dans les Spectacles Que Ce Qu’ils Sont
34

 

 What exactly made Barbette’s performance so popular and intriguing often depended on 

what the commentator or spectator wanted see in his act. Some applauded his acrobatic abilities, 

others ensured that it was his immaculate female impersonation that did the trick, while some 

believed that it was the combination of both.
35

 Though Barbette was a technically skilled 

aerialist, the acrobatics he displayed were neither outstanding nor innovative when compared to 

other aerial circus acts at the time.
36

 According to Jeffreys, the aerial aspect of his act added a 

new element to popular drag performances. Whereas most female impersonators’ ploys at the 

time were to impress audiences with fancy dress, dance and song, Barbette’s act was spectacular 

because it was physically dangerous and because drag “surpassed itself as an end and became the 

kicker for an already sensational act.”
37

 Similarly, Tait suggests that it was Barbette’s innovative 

blending of aerial action and gender transformation that made his act stand out.
38

  

 The importance attributed to Barbette’s acrobatic abilities versus female impersonation 

also very much depended on the particular venue in which he performed. Though his act, as he 

had said himself, was designed to be performed in a theater, in 1930 he accepted Cirque 

Médrano’s invitation to appear in a circus setting. “The circus requires a different type of 

approach than the music-hall,” Barbette told a reporter. “I have to somehow transpose my act. I 

have to walk differently and continuously be aware that I am now performing in a circular 

                                                 
34

 Own translation: “The only thing people see in a performance is what they are.” L’Archange du Trapèze,” 

undated. Retrieved from Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, 8-RO-16929. 
35

 It is very likely that those reviewers who stressed Barbette’s acrobatics skills may have done so to take attention 

away from his provocative woman to man transformation. See also Peta Tait, Circus Bodies, 70. 
36

 Peta Tait, Circus Bodies, 70.  
37

 Jeffreys, “Barbette: That Daring Young [Wo]Man on the Flying Trapeze,” 198.  
38

 See Tait, Circus Bodies, 75. 



104 

 

setting. I have to fill the room with myself.”
 39

 To please spectators in a circus setting, Chabrier 

wrote, Barbette had to emphasize his strong, gymnastic abilities.
40

 Novy noted that Barbette’s 

flying movements on the rings and the trapeze had become more gracious now that they could be 

observed from all angles. “One almost forgets about the magic of his female impersonation,”
41

 

she added. Another critic said that the open and circular concept of the circus allowed Barbette to 

use the space around him more freely so that his artificial and aerial beauty became even more 

remarkable.
42

 Most commentators seemed to agree: Barbette’s acrobatic skills were much more 

impressive in a circus setting, though his stage props including stairs, his fancy dress and 

feathers, seemed out of place and only effective in a theater.
43 

  

 Jean Cocteau, like others in his artistic circles, was less concerned with Barbette’s 

acrobatic abilities than with his act as a form of art and possible indicator of the instability of 

gender categories. “With Barbette, the acrobat is a pretext,” Cocteau wrote.
44

 He was especially 

intrigued by Barbette because the acrobat’s aerial performance embodied his own idea(l) of art 

and poetry. In a letter he wrote in 1916 to Etienne de Beaumont from Flanders, he made the 

comparison between “a tightrope dancer’s skilled, perilous performance and the painful 

creativity of a poet.”
45

 Arnaud, one of Cocteau’s biographers, suggests that Cocteau seemed to 

be talking about himself when he described Barbette as balancing “above the audience, above 

                                                 
39

 Legrand Chabrier, “Barbette au Cirque Medrano,” December 2, 1930. Retrieved from Bibliothèque Nationale de 

France, Paris, 8-RO-16929. My own free translation from the original quote: “Le cirque exige un autre travail que 

celui du music-hall. Il faut que je transpose, en quelque sorte, mon numéro. On marche autrement, on doit 

constamment devenir un être circulaire. Il me faut emplir la salle de moi-même.” 
40

 Ibid.  
41

 Yvon Novy, “Barbette au Cirque,” Dec 13, 1930. Retrieved from Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, 8-RO-

16929. 
42

 Jacques Patin, “Cirque Medrano: Barbette? Antonet et Bédy. Spectacle Divers,” Figaro, December 4, 1930.  
43

 R. Fuzier, “Barbette en Piste,” Le Soir, Dec 4, 1930. Retrieved from Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, 8-

RO-16929. 
44

 Cocteau quoted in Steegmuller, Cocteau: A Biography, 368. 
45

 The letter was addressed to Etienne de Beaumont from Flanders, Belgium. See Steegmuller, Cocteau: A 

Biography, 364. 



105 

 

death, above ridicule, above bad taste, above scandal, without falling.”
46

Aside from the 

similarities Cocteau saw between himself and Barbette, his sexual attraction to the aerialist 

should not be overlooked.
47

 Not only did Cocteau find a soul-mate in Barbette and vice versa, 

according to Dimock, they also had a brief romance.
48

 

In Le Numéro Barbette, published three years after he watched Barbette’s debut in Paris, 

Cocteau describes how he met Barbette in his dressing room, how he witnessed his 

transformation from man to woman before his act, and how Barbette deceived his audience 

during his act. Barbette’s secret, according to Cocteau, lay in his ability to appeal to “ those who 

s[aw] the woman in him, to those who sense[d] the man in him, as well as to others whose souls 

[we]re moved by the supernatural sex of beauty.”
49

 Here Cocteau seems to suggest that 

Barbette’s act offered audiences the chance to imagine different gender possibilities and/or to 

identify with Barbette, without fear of social repercussion. At the same time, however, Cocteau 

did not see room for alternative genders outside of the carnivalesque space of the theater.  

 Historians have different views on the meaning of Cocteau’s essay. On the one hand, 

Cocteau seems to advertise a flexible and changeable conception of gender, while on the other 

hand, he expresses anxieties about gender transformation and associates it with the grotesque. 

The passage in which Cocteau describes his reaction to Barbette who is preparing for his 

performance in his dressing room, is particularly telling:  

                                                 
46

 Cocteau quoted in Claude Arnaud, Jean Cocteau (Gallimard, 2003), 304. Original quote: “Ils se balançait sur le 

public, sur la mort, sur le ridicule, sur le mauvais goût, sur le scandale, sans tomber”, dira Cocteau, comme s’il 

parlait de lui-même,… ” 
47

 Crowson, “Cocteau and le Numéro Barbette,” 80. 
48

 Chase Dimock, “The Surreal Sex of Beauty: Jean Cocteau and Man Ray’s “Le Numéro Barbette.” 

http://asitoughttobe.com/2011/06/02/the-surreal-sex-of-beauty-jean-cocteau-and-man-ray%E2%80%99s-

%E2%80%9Cle-numero-barbette%E2%80%9D/ [accessed June 2, 2011]. 
49

 Jean Cocteau, “Le Numero Barbette,” in Man Ray and Jean Cocteau, Barbette (Berlin: bordeline, 1988).  

http://asitoughttobe.com/2011/06/02/the-surreal-sex-of-beauty-jean-cocteau-and-man-ray%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%9Cle-numero-barbette%E2%80%9D/
http://asitoughttobe.com/2011/06/02/the-surreal-sex-of-beauty-jean-cocteau-and-man-ray%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%9Cle-numero-barbette%E2%80%9D/


106 

 

 I felt at ease in that dressing room. I was smoking, chatting to a fellow 

sportsman who was having a wash before rubbing grease all over his face… 

Girls would come in, give a shriek and disappear again until Barbette, putting a 

dressing-gown on, opened the door to exchange a few words with them. … It is 

not until he pulls on his blonde wig held by a simple elastic around his ears that 

he will take up – while putting a bunch of hairpins in his mouth – the slightest 

posture of a woman doing her hair. … The transformation is complete. Jekyll is 

Hyde…. I am scared. I turn away. … It is my turn to be intimidated. The doors 

open, the girls do not feel embarrassed anymore, they come and go as they 

please…
50

  

 

Did Cocteau insert this passage simply to shock his readers, or was he genuinely afraid of 

Barbette’s transformation? According to Franko, in Le Numéro Barbette Cocteau “consigns the 

figure of the androgyne to a “no man’s land” outside the tight sexual polarity from which it 

emerged.”
51

 By insinuating the panic of being caught in a sexually indeterminable middle stage, 

Cocteau reaffirms “stereotypic male-female dichotomies while denying all possible traces of the 

middle ground to be traversed.”
52

 Franko also points to Cocteau’s use of the term ‘Jekyll and 

Hyde’ which is historically associated with hermaphroditism and monstrosity. Barbette’s 

ambiguous appearance thus seems grotesque, perhaps even freakish. It is not Barbette the woman 

who is monstrous in Cocteau’s essay, but Barbette’s first transformation from man to woman, 

which Cocteau did not describe. In Franko’s opinion, “Barbette’s changing sexual identity is 

accepted as a fait accompli but unexplored as a process, because the crossing of sex barriers, the 

bridging of incompatibles, is traditionally monstrous.”
53

 His analysis thus suggests that 

Cocteau’s interpretation of Barbette’s act reflected social anxieties about the blurring of 

boundaries between male and female. From this point of view, Cocteau seems to reinforce rather 

than challenge questions about gender and sexuality.  

                                                 
50

 Ibid.  
51

 Mark Franko, “Where he Danced: Cocteau’s Barbette and Ohno’s Water Lilies,” Modern Language Association, 

Special Topic: Performances 107 (3) (1992): 596. 
52

 Ibid.  
53

 Ibid., 597.  



107 

 

 And what about Barbette himself? He clearly transgressed “the fixed order of gender 

behavior imposed on social bodies,”
 54 

and became seemingly “unclassifiable”
55 

while in the air.  

Whether or not Barbette suggested, or intended to suggest, the possibility of alternative genders, 

remains an interesting question. Why did Barbette manifest his femininity so clearly in the 

beginning of his act and why did he show himself as a muscular and masculine performer at the 

end? Was he afraid of being perceived as caught in a middle-stage, neither man nor woman, but, 

as some reviewers depicted him, as “a strange creature,”
56

 flying “along dream paths, in a place 

where sounds are no longer heard…”?
57

 

 

Their Love-life is Even Sadder… 

 

For they have their romance, their aspirations, their disaster. Some have at their 

disposal, to introduce sensuality or sentiment into their lives, a bare hour of 

night, a fringe of shadow, a narrow and restricted space. Their field of operations 

may not transgress that limit, that corner that alcove, beyond which there is an 

accusing streetlamp, a lighted road... One more step ruins their illusion, their 

hope – I won’t add their security, for they have found no place for security in 

their existence. 

Colette, The Evening Star, 1946.
58

 

 

 

Cocteau’s and Barbette’s seeming reluctance to commit to the ‘middle stage,’ was not at 

all surprising when seen against a backdrop of postwar anxieties around gender and the 

increasing medicalization of sexuality and homosexuality in particular. In the above passage, 

Colette provides a depressing though telling description of the status of male homosexuality in 

                                                 
54

 Peta Tait, “Feminine Free Fall: A Fantasy of Freedom,” Theatre Journal 48 (1) (1996), 30.  
55

 Helen Stoddart, Rings of Desire: Circus History and Representation (UK: Manchester University Press, 2000), 

75.  
56

 Georges-Michel, “Psychologie de Barbette.”   
57

 Cocteau, “Le Numéro Barbette,” 37. 
58

 Colette, The Evening Star. Recollections (London: Peter Owen, 1946, translated by David le Vay), 58.  



108 

 

interwar France. Though there had been no anti-sodomy laws in France since 1791, anti-

obscenity law was used to censor material with homosexual content and to repress homosexual 

activities. Until 1900, the dominant explanation of male sexuality was that a gay man had “a 

woman’s soul in a man’s body,” also termed “sexual inversion” and defined as a psycho-

pathological condition.
59

 In the postwar climate in which Barbette performed, homosexuality 

was seen as a threat to traditional family values, the male race, democracy, and the nation as a 

whole. In other words, links between war, violence, emasculation, and homosexuality put gay 

men in a situations where they had to hide -or at least be ambiguous about- their sexual 

orientation. 

Despite the legal and medical repression of homosexuality, “the homosexual subculture 

in postwar Paris became both clandestine and, at the same time startlingly visible and well-

integrated in the public life of the city.”
60

 This was another one of those contradictions 

characteristic of France’s interwar hedonism; while homosexuality was often suppressed as an 

act of indecency, it also flourished, especially in the works of homosexual artists and writers for 

whom “homosexuality re-enact[ed] the trauma of war as the experience of spectacularly 

degraded manhood.”
61

 However, homosexual writers like Jean Cocteau and Marcel Proust, to 

name two familiar ones, did not make any special plea for the tolerance or acceptance of 

homosexuality, though they used a lot of irony and double entendres on the topic in their 

writings.
62

   

                                                 
59

 Carolyn J. Dean. The Frail Social Body. Pornography, Homosexuality, and Other Fantasies in Interwar France 

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 131,138.  
60

 Brooke Lindy Blower, “The Paris of Americans: Transnational Politics and Culture Between the World Wars,” 

Dissertation (Princeton University, History Department, 2005), 339. 
61

 Dean, The Frail Social Body, 144.  
62

 Ibid.,162.  



109 

 

Barbette’s performance was especially daring in light of these mixed sentiments about 

homosexuality in interwar France. Though female impersonation was common, especially for 

younger acrobats, a performance like Barbette’s that was almost entirely based on gender 

transformation was particularly provocative since it also signified a homosexual identity.
63

 

Female impersonators both benefited and suffered from a culturally anxious and aware public, 

Jeffreys explains. “The new ideas, notions, and theories about sexuality helped create a drag-

hungry public while at the same time fostering conflicted reactions to the performers.
”64 

Like 

other female impersonators, in their attempt to prevent rumours that stemmed from their gender-

bending performances, Barbette liked to emphasise his masculinity when not on stage. Like 

female impersonator and Barbette’s contemporary, American Julian Eltinge, who smoked cigars 

throughout interviews and told stories about fighting when he did not get his way,
65

 Barbette 

dressed in a tailored costume with manly hat whenever he appeared outside of the theater or 

circus. And Frank Foster, ringmaster with the Bertram Mills circus in London who knew 

Barbette, recounted how the artist would get into fights when someone dared to call him 

effeminate.
66

  

It seems plausible that Barbette’s revelation of his masculine identity and flexing of his 

muscles at the end of his performance, was also a self-protection mechanism. However, 

according to Dimock, Barbette’s display of male muscularity was also ‘performed’ and thus not 

an attempt to hide his sexuality or prevent rumours. “Barbette does not simply reveal his male 

identity and return to his true self, instead, he pantomimes and performs the masculinity 

                                                 
63

 Tait, Circus Bodies, 75.  
64

 Jeffreys, “Barbette: That Daring Young [Wo]Man on the Flying Trapeze,” 207.  
65

 Ibid. 
66

 Frank Foster, Pink Coat,  pang es and  awd st. Reminiscence of  irc s Life with  anger’s Bertram Mi  s and 

other Circuses (London: Stanley Paul and Co. Ltd, 1948), 118-119. 



110 

 

supposedly revealed by removing his wig. His male sexed body and its expected postures and 

actions,” Dimock suggests, “are revealed to be as much a product of artifice and performance as 

the female persona he adopts on stage.”
67

  

Unlike Eltinge, Barbette did not go through significant efforts to come across as 

heterosexual. While Eltinge ensured that he was seen around women and called one of them his 

wife, Barbette made no such effort. In his interview with Steegmuller near the end of his life, he 

did not seem reluctant (anymore) to reveal his homosexuality. In a short anecdote, he tells how 

Cocteau, Cocteau’s friend Maurice Rostan, and himself went to a brothel to see if they could rent 

a homosexual film.
68

 “During the running of the only blue film available at Chez Aline,” 

Barbette said, “Maurice Rostand fell asleep and snored, and Cocteau kept up a commentary on 

the defects of the acting.”
 69

 

 

Une Eve Future
70

 

While Cocteau seems to have shied away from describing Barbette’s metamorphosis 

from man to woman in Le Numéro Barbette, he did produce a series of photographs in 

cooperation with his close friend and photographer Man Ray that specifically documented the 

process of Barbette’s transformation. Ray was probably most well-known for his unconventional 

and surrealist inspired portrait photography. One photograph depicts Barbette’s genitals flattened 

by a girdle, while his chest remains breastless and his face is made feminine with make-up and a 

                                                 
67

 Dimock, “The Surreal Sex of Beauty.” 
68

 Steegmuller, Interview with Barbette, 69.  
69

 Ibid., 72.  
70

 Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, “Barbette au Casino de Paris, ” Chronique des Spectacles, Nouvelle Revue Française, 

January 1(1924): 97  



111 

 

blond wig.
71

 As Lyford notes, the photograph registered anxiety about emasculation, and caused 

discomfort because the usual cues an audience would use to figure out Barbette’s sexual identity 

were now inverted.
72

  

The shock effect that Cocteau and Ray intended to create in their works of art and also 

with Barbette’s portraits, was typical of the surrealists’ agenda to “shock bourgeois society by 

presenting the unrestrained unconscious in the most ruthless forms.”
73

 However, while surrealists 

at the time asked provocative questions about the instability of gender, the movement was 

largely sexist and homophobic.
74

 Dimock points out that some of the most iconic images of 

surrealism presented the female body as an object on which the sexual desire of the male artist 

and spectator performs violence. Belgian painter René Margritte’s very famous Le Viol or The 

Rape (1935), depicting a female torso as a face with breast as eyes, serves as one such example. 

Also, founding father of the surrealist movement, André Breton, voiced his homophobic 

sentiments quite clearly, supposedly to target Cocteau who “employed the language and imagery 

of surrealism without allegiance to Breton’s philosophy,” and “also used it to openly theorize a 

queer eroticism through it.”
75

 

                                                 
71

 Due to copyright issues I cannot display this image or any other images produced by Man Ray. To view Ray’s 

work, see http://www.manray-

photo.com/catalog/advanced_search_result.php?keywords=Barbette&categories_id=&inc_subcat=1&products_them

es=&product_years=&osCsid=d832072c80ef55ee127f8be7b2443cb3&x=-986&y=-

116?keywords=Barbette&categories_id=&inc_subcat=1&products_themes=&product_years=&osCsid=d832072c80

ef55ee127f8be7b2443cb3&x=-986&y=-116&largeur=1280 [accessed July 9, 2013].  
72

 Lyford, “The Lessons of Barbette,” 172. 
73

 Dimock, “The Surreal Sex of Beauty.” 
74

 As also Showalter has noted for the fin-de-siècle: “…the male rebellion against patriarchy did not necessarily 

mean a commitment to feminism. While the male avant-garde of the 1880s “were critical of the patriarchal order in 

which they lived and heralded its ends,” they often “looked with fear towards the new feminist order.” This paradox 

is at the heart of fin-de-siècle culture. Indeed, the strongly anti-patriarchal sentiments could also coexist comfortably 

with misogyny, homophobia, and racism.” Elaine Showalter,  e  a  Anarch    ender and    t re at the  in de 

 i c e (New York: Viking, 1990), 10. 
75

 Dimock, “The Surreal Sex of Beauty.”  

http://www.manray-photo.com/catalog/advanced_search_result.php?keywords=Barbette&categories_id=&inc_subcat=1&products_themes=&product_years=&osCsid=d832072c80ef55ee127f8be7b2443cb3&x=-986&y=-116?keywords=Barbette&categories_id=&inc_subcat=1&products_themes=&product_years=&osCsid=d832072c80ef55ee127f8be7b2443cb3&x=-986&y=-116&largeur=1280
http://www.manray-photo.com/catalog/advanced_search_result.php?keywords=Barbette&categories_id=&inc_subcat=1&products_themes=&product_years=&osCsid=d832072c80ef55ee127f8be7b2443cb3&x=-986&y=-116?keywords=Barbette&categories_id=&inc_subcat=1&products_themes=&product_years=&osCsid=d832072c80ef55ee127f8be7b2443cb3&x=-986&y=-116&largeur=1280
http://www.manray-photo.com/catalog/advanced_search_result.php?keywords=Barbette&categories_id=&inc_subcat=1&products_themes=&product_years=&osCsid=d832072c80ef55ee127f8be7b2443cb3&x=-986&y=-116?keywords=Barbette&categories_id=&inc_subcat=1&products_themes=&product_years=&osCsid=d832072c80ef55ee127f8be7b2443cb3&x=-986&y=-116&largeur=1280
http://www.manray-photo.com/catalog/advanced_search_result.php?keywords=Barbette&categories_id=&inc_subcat=1&products_themes=&product_years=&osCsid=d832072c80ef55ee127f8be7b2443cb3&x=-986&y=-116?keywords=Barbette&categories_id=&inc_subcat=1&products_themes=&product_years=&osCsid=d832072c80ef55ee127f8be7b2443cb3&x=-986&y=-116&largeur=1280
http://www.manray-photo.com/catalog/advanced_search_result.php?keywords=Barbette&categories_id=&inc_subcat=1&products_themes=&product_years=&osCsid=d832072c80ef55ee127f8be7b2443cb3&x=-986&y=-116?keywords=Barbette&categories_id=&inc_subcat=1&products_themes=&product_years=&osCsid=d832072c80ef55ee127f8be7b2443cb3&x=-986&y=-116&largeur=1280


112 

 

Though Man Ray was inspired by surrealism, his portraits of Barbette were not especially 

sexist, but rather intended to mock the violence inflicted by World War I and the fear of 

emasculation as a result. Man Ray’s photographs indeed embodied the fears and desires of a 

“civilization without sexes,” so termed by French writer Drieu La Rochelle.
76

 La Rochelle had 

long sympathized with the surrealists and shared their belief that bourgeois culture was 

vulnerable if one attacked the strict categories of gender at the center of bourgeois domestic and 

public life.
77

 Already in 1924 he had seen in Barbette an “Eve future,”
78 and admired his clever 

blending of both male and female characteristics. While asserting that the quality of Barbette’s 

act was not determined by his acrobatic feats, but by the beauty of the performer, he wrote: 

Barbette does not have hips: her athleticism and her negation render them 

invisible. She is muscular and ready for everything. She is draped in a piece of 

cloth, evocative of a banknote and wears pearls as those belonging to Venus.
79

 

 

“What a difference,” La Rochelle asserted, “between this majestic nervous amazon and the 

plump women one sees elsewhere, with their muscles packed in fat…”
80

 

 La Rochelle’s comments about the blending of masculine and female characteristics 

would serve as pretext for his break with surrealism in 1925 and his turn to a more fascist 

agenda.
81

 A collaborator with Nazi-Germany, La Rochelle saw in Barbette’s muscular yet 

elegant body possibilities for the re-establishment of a strong and healthy European race. While 

artists like Cocteau and Ray viewed Barbette’s performance as proof of the constructedness of 

gender and “the impossibility of re-creating a unified social body,”
 
to La Rochelle Barbette 

                                                 
76

 See Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes, 6.  
77

 Lyford, “The Lessons of Barbette,” 182. 
78

 La Rochelle, “Barbette au Casino de Paris,” 97.  
79

 Ibid., 97-8. Orignal quote : “Elle n’a pas de flancs : l’athlétisme et la négation les tiennent effacés. Elle est 

musclée, prête à tout. Elle est vêtue d’un morceau d’étoffe, suggestif comme un bank-note. Et des perles, tout ce qui 

reste a Venus de ses origines.” 
80

 Ibid., 98. Original quote : “Quelle différence entre cette grande amazone nerveuse et les grosses femelles qu’on 

voit ailleurs, aux muscles empaquetés dans la graisse, gênées par la grâce comme par un souvenir.”  
81

 Lyford, “The Lessons of Barbette,” 177.  



113 

 

seemed to suggest a “protofascist body… in which the virile power of man would fuse directly 

with the beauty and creative energy of a woman.”
82

 This becomes very clear in his novel Gilles 

(1939), which describes the encounter between Dora, an androgynous, beautiful, muscular, blond 

woman, reminiscent of Barbette, who embodies feminine power and reproductivity, and Gilles, 

whose body is “dis-integrated, split in two, partly virile and partly weak.”
83

 In La Rochelle’s 

novel and imagination, as Lyford points out, the “ideal body did not resecure the boundaries 

between the sexes; rather, it fused the essential characteristics of the modern woman and the 

idealized action of the wartime man into a newborn fascist individual.”
84

 So, while Cocteau and 

Ray saw Barbette’s performance as a clear illustration of the ways in which the war had 

shattered traditional values, as well as French society’s struggle to find a new balance, La 

Rochelle seemed to find that very balance, and thus a solution to male emasculation, in a strong, 

androgynous body like Barbette’s.  

  

Un Hommage à La Femme
85

  

 Though Barbette would probably never have made a link between his own performance 

and a fascist body ideal, he was flattered by the comments La Rochelle made in 1924 about his 

beautiful appearance that stood in sharp contrast with many female performers’ imperfect 

bodies.
86

 In his attempt “to bring an act that could not be executed by a woman,”
87

 Barbette 

claimed to eat and train very little in order to keep his muscles from developing too much and to 

                                                 
82

 Ibid., 182.  
83

 Ibid., 179-180.  
84

 Ibid., 182. 
85

 Maurice Verne, Musée de Voluptés. Le Secret des Nuits Electriques (Paris : Editions des Portiques, 1930), 223.  
86

 Steegmuller, Interview with Barbette, 66.  
87

 Bizet, “Le Double Visage. Dans La Loge de Barbette, ” Original words: “je devais composer un numéro qu’une 

femme ne pouvait pas faire.” 



114 

 

maintain a thin waist.
88

 “[W]omen today who come visit me in my dressing room and who find I 

have a fashionable body, spend time comparing their silhouette with mine in the mirror and are 

happy when they find out they are as thin as me,”
89

 he told one reporter. He was clearly a style 

icon, representing a female body ideal that was also fashionable. It was not a coincidence that the 

much idolized “silhouette of la femme moderne - as a being without breasts, without a waist, 

without hips -” which Barbette so perfectly represented, “visually expressed the erosion of 

traditional cultural categories.”
90

 

 Taking on a female identity was one thing, but being able to keep it a secret until the end 

of a physically demanding performance was another. “With each motion, his body or his 

costume could have betrayed him since nothing he did on stage was passive,” Crowson notes.
91

 

Suppressing his masculine identity would have been difficult in non-demanding activities like 

walking for example, let alone while executing highly physical aerial acrobatics in very short 

attire.
92

 In an interview in 1926, Barbette explained how he maintained a feminine identity on 

stage:  

Don’t even think that that wig is enough: the dress makes my waist look very 

thin, but that still does not make my feminine image perfect. When I spread my 

arms out with my palms facing upwards, you will see my masculine biceps. If, 

on the contrary, I keep my palms facing downwards, my biceps are not visible 

anymore and my arms are like a woman’s … Look at my back… if I keep my 

back straight, my shoulder blades stand out. If I bend slightly, I give my back a 

harmonious curve and have a back like a woman’s. And my knees? See, I have 

very pointy knees, and that is a masculine characteristic. I never keep my legs 

                                                 
88

 Georges-Michel, “Psychologie de Barbette.” Original words: “Je ne mange rien dans la journée pour garder ma 

taille fine. Dans le temps, on mettait des corsets. Aujourd’hui il faut bien que je marche avec la mode, n’est-ce pas ;” 

Legrand-Chabrier, “Dans les Coulisses du Music-hall. Comment Barbette se Métamorphose,” Le Petit Parisien 17 

(Feb 1935). 
89

 Ibid., Original words : “ …les femmes d’aujourd’hui qui viennent dans ma loge et qui trouve que j’ai un corps à la 

mode, passent leur temps à comparer dans la glace leur silhouette a la mienne et elles sont enchantées quand elles se 

trouvent aussi plates que moi.” 
90

 Roberts, Civilization without sexes, 71.  
91

 Crowson, “Cocteau and le Numéro Barbette,” 80- 81. 
92

 Ibid., 81. 



115 

 

straight, I always bend them slightly and try to keep one foot pointed as much as 

possible… Moreover, I am always moving during my performances, so the 

audience does not have the time to examine my legs closely.
93

  

 

Though Barbette was a master of female impersonation, according to Vilona Pilchers’ 

lyrical review, the audience must have sensed that he was not what they viewed as a typical 

woman. There was certainly something mysterious about him, something that they could not 

quite pin down. Walking down the stairs in a long, feathered dress, his legs close to one another 

and his toes pointed, accentuating his slim silhouette, may not have raised much suspicion about 

his real identity. During his aerial performance, however, his muscularity seemed more difficult 

to hide. Pilcher writes: 

… study that bending back… Within its frail framework the most masculine of 

muscles are moving like levers, folding and unfolding as if their very friction 

would burn away the flesh. And observe that long bone of the back, when arched 

at its acutest angle. Like a bow it bends backwards, bending like a bow of brass 

stained for the flight of an arrow of iron.”
94

 

 

To keep his audience guessing about his ‘real’ identity, and to reassure the spectators that 

he was a woman after his first performance on the high wire, Barbette lay down on a couch set 

on stage and with feminine gestures slowly started to take off his layered clothing. “Long brittle 

fingers snap off a shiny slipper, slop off a silky sock, snap off a second shiny slipper, slip off a 

second silky sock,”
95

 Pilcher wrote, accentuating Barbette’s erotic undressing. Cocteau observed 

that Barbette’s “scabrous little scene” on the sofa was meant to throw dust in the spectators’ eyes 

                                                 
93

 Bizet, “Le Double Visage. Dans La Loge de Barbette.” Own translation from original quote : “ …Ne croyez pas 

que cette perruque suffise pourtant: je suis très serré a la taille par la jupe, mais cela encore ne donnerait qu’une 

image féminine imparfaite. Que je tienne mes bras en croix, les paumes vers le ciel, on voit des biceps masculins, 

qu’au contraire je les tienne les paumes vers la terre, vous n’apercevez plus les biceps, j’ai des bras de femme… 

Regardez le dos… si je me tien droit, mes omoplates ressortent, j’ai un dos d’homme, si je me penche légèrement je 

donne à mon dos une courbe harmonieuse, j’ai un dos de femme. Et les genoux? Voyez, j’ai les genoux pointus, et 

cela c’est un signe masculin, jamais je ne tiens mes jambes droites, je plie toujours légèrement mes jambes et je me 

tiens le plus possible avec un pied sur la pointe… De plus, je suis toujours en mouvement dans mon numéro pour 

qu’on n’ait pas le temps d’examiner mes jambes trop à loisir… ”
 93

 
94

 Velona Pilcher, “A Star Turn,” Theatre Arts Monthly XIV (12) (December 1930): 1034.  
95

 Ibid. 



116 

 

because he would need “entire freedom of movement” for his performance on the rings and 

trapeze.
96

 In other words, his interlude on the couch served to reinstate his female identity for 

those who had started to question it.  

Though Barbette took his female impersonation very seriously by studying women’s 

movements and claiming that his performance was “un hommage à la femme,”
97

 it did not 

exactly put women in a positive light. Indeed, while Cocteau suggested play with categories of 

gender, he meant play from a male perspective only. Both Cocteau and Barbette seemed to take 

pleasure in their ability to create something that they believed was more beautiful and better than 

any woman in the world. Barbette made all women around him fade and look ugly, according to 

Cocteau.
98

 The aerialist “sums up in one all the women he has observed, becoming then the 

typical female in such a convincing manner that he eclipses the prettiest women appearing before 

and after him. Thanks to Barbette,” he added, “I now understand that it was not only for the sake 

of decency that the great nations and cultures had men play women’s parts.”
99

 Also Barbette 

made misogynist comments on more than one occasion. He told a reporter, for example, that his 

female fans really put him off. They sent him too many cards and gifts and, sometimes to his 

frustration, came to see him after his performance. They were not nearly as charming or discrete, 

Barbette indicated, as his male admirers who barely dared to pass him their cards.
100

  

 

                                                 
96

 Man Ray and Jean Cocteau, “Barbette” (Berlin: Borderline, 1988).  
97

 Verne, Musée de Voluptés, 223.  
98

 Arnaud, Jean Cocteau, 304. Own translation from original quote : “Cette créature ravissante tuais les petites 

femmes autour. Elles s’éteignent, devenaient laides. C’est qu’en jouant le rôle de la femme, il les résumait toutes.” 
99

 Ray and Cocteau, “Barbette.” 
100

 Georges-Michel, “Psychologie de Barbette.” 



117 

 

Life after 1938 

 Having travelled around the world for more than twenty years, Barbette gave his final 

performance in 1938 at the Loew’s State Theater in New York City. While sweating heavily 

after his act, he purportedly caught a chill in a backstage draft. The next morning he could hardly 

move. Diagnosed with pneumonia and sudden stiffness of his joints, he spent eighteen months in 

hospital for surgery and recovery. Barbette’s illness did not only drain him financially (he had to 

sell his property in Texas), but also emotionally.
101

  

“The Barbette act is finished for all time,” he wrote to his friend and famous pianist 

Katharine Goodson.  

Perhaps it was better so… No one will ever be able to say that my last 

appearance wasn’t one of my best. I should have had to give it up some time. 

But I would have liked to have a little more time to adjust myself gradually. To 

have everything torn from you at once is a terrifying experience.
102 

 

 

During his recovery, he also exchanged letters with his friend Anton Dolin, in which he told him 

how he wished he had died during his operation.
103

 Reminiscing about his career, Barbette wrote: 

Too much has been written of the glamour and fascination of opening nights, 

applause, triumph, adulation, fame, and so little of the dreary struggles to get 

somewhere. Years of work, rehearsing, practising, hoping hopelessly against 

hope that your time will come, the unending succession of drab provincial 

towns, filthy dressing-rooms, poor food, miserable hotels. We must be indeed a 

breed apart to survive it all. And then when you do know anything approaching 

success, you forget all the unpleasantness, forget how you sat in dressing-rooms 

and cried hot scalding tears of despair.
104

 
 

Surprisingly little is known about Barbette’s life after his accident, as it seems typical for 

circus and vaudeville performers once out of the limelight, though some anecdotal information 

reveal his second career as a self-proclaimed aerial-choreographer starting around 1942. He 

                                                 
101 

Steegmuller, Interview with Barbette, 72. 
102

 Dolin, Ballet Go Round, 306. 
103

 Ibid., 305. 
104

 Ibid., 307-308. 



118 

 

would be credited with inventing the aerial ballet spectacular, which after its inception became a 

standard part of many circuses.
105

 Barbette trained young aerialists in several circuses in the 

United States and negotiated contracts with Hollywood studios to choreograph aerial scenes in a 

number of films. In 1958, for example, he was aerial director for the film Jumbo where his duties 

included teaching actors to walk the tight wire.
106

 Around 1969, near the end of his career, he 

toured with Disney on Parade through Australia in charge of an electrical carousel on which six 

young female aerialists with butterfly wings performed.
107

  

Hammarstrom who wrote about the life of John Ringling North and his circus, describes 

how Barbette, also billed as “the Entrepreneur of Enchantment,” once brought to the Sonoma 

County Fairgrounds Pavilion in Santa Rosa, California “a fascinating procession of theatrical 

trunks, odd mechanical contraptions, rough-looking roustabouts to put them together…. Huge 

butterfly wings, enormous deflated clown heads, piles of twisted cables and pulleys, silver bars 

and hinged platforms, light fixtures…”
108

 Clearly, Barbette had not lost his fascination with 

extravagant aerial spectacle. The butterfly wings were to be used by his twelve female aerialists, 

which he had named the Aerialovelies. Hammarstrom recounts how “very few of the 

Aerialovelies ever tasted the thrill of victory”
 
 because Barbette, perfectionist as he was, was 

hardly ever entirely satisfied with them; he scolded them for chewing gum, for not showing up 

for training, and for not practicing hard enough. “When you are peeling, you’ll look like Bozo 

the Clown up there in the lights,” he told one of his pupils who had been sunbathing for too 

                                                 
105

 Robert A. Burns, “Vander Barbette: Round Rock’s Gift to Paris,” retrieved from the Harry Ransom Humanities 

Research Centre, The University of Texas, Austin.   
106

 Ibid. 
107

 Hammarstrom, Behind the Big Top, 37.  
108

 Ibid., 30. This must have been around 1953. See Ukiah News, “Top Acts Listed by Shrine Circus,” April 23, 

1953. 



119 

 

long.
109

 Barbette, quite literally, hovered over his performers and equipment like a “possessed 

puppeteer in control of every string.” However, despite his reputation as an irritable 

perfectionist, he has also been described as humoristic and genuinely concerned with his 

performers. He would lobby to increase their salaries, gave them money out of his own pockets, 

even paid for abortions, and rarely got his money back.
110

  

Barbette was clearly a man of contrasts. Besides his dedication to this work as aerial 

choreographer and the ambitious aerial spectacles he coordinated, he also revealed himself as a 

rather embittered man. During his interview with Steegmuller in 1926 in a coffee shop, Barbette 

would have returned a plate, scolded the waitress when the coffee arrived too early and when she 

put down some spoons rather noisily. “Since these years in Paris I’ve never been able to readjust 

to crudity,” Barbette admitted. “[A]part from my family everything about Austin offends me.”
 111

 

Due to a combination of unemployment and depression as a result of his failing health, 

Barbette resorted to sleeping pills and died in 1973 at the age of 68.
112

 Though the Austin 

Statesman did not carry his obituary, indicating his seemingly unknown accomplishments as 

aerial performer and choreographer in the United States at the time of his death,
113

 he has never 

ceased to inspire filmmakers, writers and performers. While Barbette was Cocteau’s muse in Le 

Numéro Barbette (1926), he also played a small role in Cocteau’s film Le  ang d’ n Po te 

(1930) in which he is seen, beautifully dressed as a woman by Coco Chanel, watching a play 

from a theater balcony.
114

 Barbette would also serve as inspiration for the character of Death in 

                                                 
109

 Hammarstrom, 32.  
110

 Ibid., 31, 33.  
111

 Steegmuller, Interview with Barbette, 66, 69.  
112

 Hammarstrom, Behind the Big Top, 37; Michael Moore, Drag! Male and Femal Impersonators on Stage, Screen 

and Television (Jefferson, North Carolina and London: McFarland & Compagny, Inc., Publishers, 1994), 122. 
113

 Burns, “Vander Barbette: Round Rock’s Gift to Paris.”  
114

 New York Times, “Vander Barbette Is Dead at 68; Trapeze Artist in the Twenties,” August 10, 1973. 



120 

 

Cocteau’s play Orphée (1950).
115

 More recently, in 1979, Albert Goldbarth used Barbette as 

inspiration throughout his poetic work Different Fleshes,
116

 and in 1993, in his work Light Shall 

Lift Them, performance artists John Kelly revived Barbette’s story for contemporary audiences in 

an artistic combination of theater performance and cinema.
117

                                                 
115

 See Kazuyuki Matsuda, “La Mort Sous la Forme d’Une Jeune Femme Chez Cocteau - Sur la Genèse du 

Personnage de la Princesse du Film Orphée,” 219-26. http://www.let.osaka-

u.ac.jp/france/gallia/texte/40/40matsuda.pdf [accessed March 13, 2013]. 
116

 Albert Goldbarth, Different Fleshes. A Novel/poem (Geneva, N.Y., 1979).   
117

 Jeffreys, “Barbette: That Daring Young [Wo]Man on the Flying Trapeze,” 207. Le  ang d’ n Po te: see 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAqxEq4ylb4 [accessed June 30, 2013];  L’Orphée: see 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VT4og-xpAas [accessed June 30, 2013]; excerpts from Light Shall Lift Them: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAnNhju6MGw and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLZdCtP1pHY 

[accessed June 30, 2013].  

http://www.let.osaka-u.ac.jp/france/gallia/texte/40/40matsuda.pdf
http://www.let.osaka-u.ac.jp/france/gallia/texte/40/40matsuda.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAqxEq4ylb4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VT4og-xpAas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAnNhju6MGw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLZdCtP1pHY


121 

 

Chapter V: Bessie Coleman: “The Only Race Aviatrix in the World”
1 

 

Working black women could not always access pen and paper as did the white 

male explorers and adventures whose exploits have become foundational 

histories. Nor have they been granted the kind of historical publicity garnered by 

black male artists and activists. But a number of narratives do exist that tell of 

black women’s voyages. Most of these remain understudied, or at least not 

considered for what they say about movement and mobility. 

 

Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls, 10.  

 

Introduction  

 Aviation history received renewed interest with the centennial celebration of the first 

successful powered flight in 1903 by the American brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright. The 

United States Centennial of Flight Commission, established in 1999 by aviation institutions 

across the country, had among its appointed tasks to “assist in conducting educational, civic and 

commemorative activities relating to the centennial of powered flight,” and to “encourage the 

publication of popular and scholarly works on the history of aviation or the centennial of 

powered flight.”
2
 This celebration of the inaugural flight not only resulted in a number of flight 

exhibitions, air meets, and aviation educational projects and publications, it also triggered 

increased interest in the remarkable accomplishments of some less well-known aviation pioneers, 

including several female aviators whose accomplishments have long gone unrecognized.   

                                                 
1
 These are the words of the black newspaper the Chicago Defender. See Chicago Defender, “Bessie Coleman 

Makes Initial Aerial Flight,” October 21, 1922. On several other occasions, the Chicago Defender refers to Bessie 

Coleman as “the only Race aviatrix” or “the only aviatrix of the Race.” See for example Chicago Defender, 

“World’s Greatest Event,” August 26, 1922; Chicago Defender, “Rain Halts the Initial Flight of Miss Bessie,” 

September 2, 1922.  
2
 United States Centennial of Flight Commission, “Final Report for the Centennial of Flight Commemoration,” April 

2004. http://www.centennialofflight.gov/about/natl_plan.htm [accessed February 13, 2011]; Centennial of Flight 

Commemoration Act, Public Law 105-389, November 13, 1998, 4.   

http://www.centennialofflight.gov/about/natl_plan.htm


122 

 

 On March 10, 2010, for example, hundreds of Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) 

were honoured with a Congressional Gold Medal for their service during World War II.
3
 These 

pilots tested and transported various types of airplanes before their use by male pilots during 

battle. Unlike their male counterparts in the military, the WASP women were mostly volunteers 

who paid for their own flight training. The missions they flew were dangerous and required the 

same level of skill as needed by male pilots flying combat missions, yet it was only in 1978 that 

Congress acknowledged the WASPs’ significance by recognizing them as veterans and granting 

them limited military benefits.
4
 The stories of several WASP members have been documented in 

“Fly Girls” (1999), produced by the American Experience and aimed at presenting “the largely 

unknown story” of the WASPs who “recall the planes they flew, the challenges they met, and the 

pride they felt in playing a role in the American war effort.”
5
 

There has also been renewed interest in the exploits of aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart 

(1897-1937), widely known as the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean in 1932, and 

generally less known as a strong advocate of women’s rights in aviation. Plans to create a statue 

of Earhart in the United States Capitol’s statuary hall are illustrative of her standing in the public 

mind.
6
 And when remnants of a bone were found recently on a remote island in the South 

Pacific, hopes were raised that the truth might finally be revealed through DNA tests about 

                                                 
3
 Christian Science Monitor, “Decades Later, Women Pilots from World War II Get Their Due,” March 10, 2010.   

4
 Katherine Sharp Landdeck, “Experiment in the Cockpit. The Women Airforce Service Pilots of World War II,” in 

The Airplane in American Cultur, ed. Dominick A Pisano (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 195. 

See also Katherine S. Gray, “Flying in Formation: Creating a Place for Women in Aviation Through the Ninety-

Nines, the Women Airforce Service Pilots, and the Whirly Girls,” Master’s Thesis (Miami University Oxford, Ohio, 

2007). The women of the British Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) were also recently commemorated by the British 

government. See for instance the Telegraph, “Air Transport Auxiliary Women to Be Honoured,” February 21, 2008.  
5
 See http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/flygirls/filmmore/index.html [accessed February 23, 2011].  

6
 See for instance Washington Post, “Amelia Earhart Flies Into Statuary Hall,” August 27, 2010.  

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/flygirls/filmmore/index.html


123 

 

Earhart’s mysterious disappearance in 1937 during her attempt to fly around the world.
7
 The 

movie Amelia, released in October 2009, attempted to provide new insights into Earhart’s life 

and her accomplishments as a pilot, although her aviation aspirations were somewhat 

overshadowed by the script’s focus upon her romantic relationship with her publicity manager 

and later husband, George Palmer Putnam.  

Despite this increased level of interest in female aviation pioneers, many of the 

remarkable exploits of hundreds of women who were pilots during the 1920s and 1930s remain 

unacknowledged.
8
 Indeed, the movie Amelia may well have given an incorrect impression that 

aside from Earhart, there were no other female pilots worth celebrating in the 1920s or before. 

To be sure, Earhart’s legacy was a strong symbol for women’s emancipation during the turbulent 

interwar years, but it should not be forgotten that she was, in many ways, a woman of privilege. 

Unlike most female pilots of the time, Earhart’s parents were fully supportive of her aviation 

career and even helped her purchase her first airplane.
9
 As one of a handful of female aviators in 

the early 1920s, she was selected to be the first female passenger to be flown across the Atlantic 

Ocean in 1928. This flight, combined with her physical resemblance to Charles Lindbergh, the 

much-celebrated aviation hero who flew solo across the Atlantic in 1927, was the beginning of 

“Lady Lindy’s” successful aviation career. Strongly promoted by George Palmer Putnam, 

                                                 
7
 See for instance Texarkana Gazette, “Researchers May Have Solved Mystery of Earhart Disappearance,” 

December 18, 2010; New York Times, “DNA Tests May Resolve Enduring Earhart Mystery,” December 18, 2010.  
8
 In 1933, for example, there were no less than 608 licensed pilots in the United States. See The 99er, “To Date Data 

on Women Pilots,” December 2, 1933.  
9
 Elizabeth Amelia Hadley Freydberg, Bessie Coleman The Brownskin Lady Bird (New York & London 1994), 112. 

See also p. 111, 113. See also Susan Ware, Still Missing. Amelia Earhart and the Search for Modern Feminism 

(New York: Norton, 1993), 36.  



124 

 

Earhart was able to fund her aviation adventures as well as write several books and articles 

describing her life and experiences as a white, female adventurer and aviator.
10

  

Who, then, were those other exceptionally skilled female aviation pioneers who remain 

largely underrepresented in writings on aviation history? Although plans are underway to 

produce a movie in honour of Harriet Quimby (1875-1912), America’s first female pilot and the 

first woman to fly across the English Channel,
11

 several female aviation pioneers’ remarkable 

exploits remain in the dark. Little has been written, for example, about Louise Thaden (1905-

1979), who not only won the first (and extremely hazardous) eight-day women’s cross-country 

flying race from Santa Monica, California to Cleveland, Ohio in 1929, but also beat her male 

counterparts in the prestigious Bendix Race in 1936.
12

 Much remains to be said about Helen 

Richy (1909-1947), the first woman to obtain a position as a professional passenger-transport 

pilot in 1934,
13

 but who chose to resign when she was not allowed to fly during bad weather or 

when she was menstruating.
14

  

 Less well known, especially among white audiences, is Earhart’s nearest contemporary, 

African American Bessie Coleman (1892-1926). Coleman was an ardent advocate of civil rights 

for African Americans. She saw aviation as a means for African Americans to enter mainstream 

                                                 
10

 See Doris. L. Rich, Amelia Earhart: A Biography (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1989); Ann 

Herrmann, “On Amelia Earhart: The Aviatrix as American Dandy,” Michigan Quarterly Review 39 (2000): 77-107.  
11

 See http://www.onlineprnews.com/news/80279-1290206862-americas-first-female-aviators-story-finally-told-in-

biographs-harriet-quimby-movie.html [accessed February 23, 2011].  
12

 Joe Christy, Racing Planes and Pilots, Aircraft Competition, Past and Present! (Blue Ridge Summit, 

Pennsylvania: 1982), 123; Claudia Oakes, United States Women in Aviation 1930-1939 (Washington D.C.: 

Smithsonian Institution, 1985), 29-30. Louise Thaden devoted an entire chapter to her 1936 Bendix Race victory in 

her autobiography High, Wide and Frightened, 109-122. See Louise M. Thaden, High Wide and Frightened 

(Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2004).  
13

 E. Collier, “Helen Richey is Uncle Sam’s First Woman Air-Mail Pilot,” Washington Post, January, 1935; Oakes, 

United States Women in Aviation 1930-1939, 13. 
14

 Christian Science Monitor, “Miss Richey Explains Quitting Pilot’s Job,” November 7, 1935; George Palmer 

Putnam, Soaring Wings. A Biography of Amelia Earhart (New York: Hartcourt, Brace and Company, 1939), 159-

160. See also Melodie Andrews, “Daredevils and Ladybirds: Gender and the Aviation Industry before World War 

II,”Essays in Economic and Business History 13(1995): 277-88. 



125 

 

society and to counteract the stereotypes that had inhibited their progress in succeeding in the 

professional sphere. Coleman built a remarkable career as a pilot, and her early death in 1926, 

like Earhart’s, was both tragic and surrounded by controversy. Given that her name does not 

“grace the pages of aviation record books” and “is conspicuously absent from aviation 

histories,”
15

 in this chapter I commemorate Bessie Coleman’s important role as an aviation 

advocate and so contribute to the developing history of female aviators in North America. In 

addition, I illustrate how Coleman negotiated race, gender and class struggles through her aerial 

activities.  

Providing insight into Coleman’s life and personality is challenging, however, given that 

her aviation career, while covered by the black newspaper press (Chicago Defender, the 

Baltimore Afro-American and the Pittsburgh Courier), remained mostly unaddressed by the 

same white newspapers that extensively reported on the stunts, records and races of Earhart and 

other white women pilots. Though the black newspaper reports on Coleman’s career were not 

necessarily more limited or less accurate than white reports, the fact that white newspapers 

seldom reported about Coleman’s aerial activities is indicative of her marginal status in the field 

of aviation at the time and consequently, in aviation history more generally. In addition, 

Coleman did not write about her life or contributed stories of her exploits to magazines as did 

Earhart and Louise Thaden, for example. It is not surprising then that Coleman’s biographers 

have acknowledged that tracing her past remains a complex task.
16

  

Unlike biographers Doris L. Rich (1993), Elizabeth A. Hadley Freydberg (1994) and 

Jacques Béal’s (2008) attempts to provide a full reconstruction of Coleman’s life, my interest lies 

                                                 
15

 Freydberg, Bessie Coleman. The Brownskin Lady Bird, 18.  
16

 The only account of Coleman’s story by a close family member is that of her sister Elois Coleman Patterson in her 

short memoirs entitled Memoirs of the Late Bessie Coleman Aviatrix. Pioneer of the Negro People in Aviation 

(1969). This document was obtained through the Bessie Coleman Foundation (BCF) in Washington, D.C.  



126 

 

in exploring Coleman’s importance as a stunt flyer, an aviation entrepreneur and an activist, and 

in providing greater insight into the complex socio-political climate in which she, as a black, 

working-class woman, navigated her aviation career.
17

 I pay attention to the ways in which she 

performed gender and race in her attempt to gain a foothold in the white, male dominated 

aviation industry. This chapter is also a response to Pisano’s recent call for historians to take 

aviation history out of isolation and to increasingly connect it to a broader cultural context.
18

  

Accordingly, I aim to bring to light the remarkable accomplishments of Bessie Coleman while 

paying close attention to the race and gender struggles she had to cope with in pursuit of her 

desire to fly. Moreover, I illustrate that aerial activities by black performers were often received 

with much anxiety by white individuals because of fears that black Americans would advance in 

technological fields such as aviation.   

 

The Winged Gospel’s Female Missionaries  

Before the Wright brothers captured the imagination of aviation enthusiasts with their 

first successful powered flight in 1903, there had been a long history of experiments and 

exhibitions with lighter-than-air machines as a popular form of entertainment. Since the end of 

the 18th century, hot-air balloons had attracted large audiences, especially when stunts were 

                                                 
17

 It needs to be acknowledged that in this paper I, as a white, European, female author, do not intend to speak for 

Bessie Coleman; rather, I intend to speak with her. In their paper on perceptions of black female athletes Vertinsky 

and Captain (1998) write that “[t]heories and analyses of white feminist scholars often make little sense in terms of 

everyday racial experiences of women of color.” See Patricia Vertinksy and Gwendolyn Captain, “More Myth than 

History: American Culture and Representations of the Black Female’s Athletic Ability,” Journal of Sport History 

25(3) (1998), 534. Indeed, white scholars have too often viewed black peoples’ experiences through their white and 

usually Western perspectives, often resulting in a reinforcement of stereotypes. Therefore, and as these authors 

suggest, as a white scholar theorizing about black individuals’ experiences, I aim to engage in dialogue, not 

monologue by seeking out similarities and differences in experiences of both black and white women who were 

pilots in the 1920s and ’30s. Vertinksy and Captain, “More Myth than History,” 536.  
18

 Dominick A. Pisano (ed), “New Directions in the History of Aviation,” in The Airplane in American Culture (Ann 

Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2006), 10.  



127 

 

performed on trapezes hanging underneath the airships or when daredevils performed parachute 

jumps by leaping out of the balloon. Ballooning, as Pisano points out, was synonymous with 

circus performances, which were becoming increasingly popular at the time. This new form of 

mass entertainment was not without risk and severe injury, and even death, was common. The 

more spectacular ballooning became, the more it was associated with recklessness and death, and 

eventually came to be regarded as impure and immoral. As a result, the Aero Club of America 

was established in 1905 with the aim of shifting aviation’s status as entertainment for the masses 

to a sport appropriate for the wealthy upper class. The club primarily consisted of members of 

the prestigious Automobile Club of America and other affluent aviation enthusiasts.
19

 That same 

year, the Féderation Aéronautique Internationale (FAI) was created in France to oversee 

aviation activities and to keep track of aviation records in the United States and in several 

European countries. This institutionalization and quantification of aviation in 1905 would lay the 

groundwork for a flourishing aviation industry during the interwar period.
20

 

Although ballooning had been criticized for being an activity too vulgar to entertain 

crowds, the spectacular success of stunt flyers (in their even more hazardous heavier-than-air 

planes) drew large audiences during the 1910s. After a short interruption during World War I, a 

revival of stunt flying was facilitated by the availability of cheap surplus military aircraft that 

were no longer needed for the war effort. The most common airplane, the Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny” 

biplane, was sold for only $300 to $500.
21

 Many ex-military pilots who were without jobs after 

the war took advantage of these cheap planes in order to make a living. They traveled around the 

                                                 
19

 Dominick  A. Pisano, “The Greatest Show Not on Earth,” in The Airplane in American Culture (Ann Arbor: The 

University of Michigan Press, 2006), 41-4.  
20

 Ibid., 47.  
21

 Amy Sue Bix, “Bessie Coleman Race and Gender Realities Behind Aviation Dreams,” in Realizing the Dream of 

Flight, ed. Virginia P. Dawson and Mark D. Bowles (Washington: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 

NASA History Division, 2005), 2. 



128 

 

country and introduced large audiences to aviation technology by taking passengers for short 

rides and by performing dangerous aerial stunts. These “barnstormers,”
22

 as they were called, 

often teamed up and started “flying circuses.” Not a male-only event, in many of these circuses, 

women would execute difficult and daring stunts, while men piloted the planes. These women 

included agile acrobats, wing-walkers, and parachute jumpers who dazzled crowds with their 

stunts high upon an airplane’s wings or while swinging on a bar beneath the craft.
23

  

Barnstorming and stunt flying were practically the sole means of access to a career in 

aviation during the first years after World War I, especially for women who wanted to become 

part of the budding aviation industry.
24

 Unlike the prewar era, when aviation was mainly the 

privilege of a select few who could afford to buy an airplane and pay for flying lessons, 

barnstorming in the 1920s made it possible for upwardly mobile women, as well as men, to 

become involved in the aviation circuit, to make a living out of it and, in some cases, to buy their 

own planes.
25

 “The attraction of women to aviation was a strong one,” Corn points out, “for no 

                                                 
22

 Freydberg explains: “Barnstorming was a term initially associated with theatre, and it referred to actors who 

traveled from city to city and town to town. Because in most cases there was nowhere for them to board, or lodge 

temporarily while on the performing circuit, they found the nearest barn to sleep in for the night, and by day they 

moved on to the next town to perform. By the early 1920s aeronautical barnstorming had become synonymous with 

adventurous people, primarily unemployed former World War I fighter pilots, who flew surplus army aircraft for 

entertainment. These pilots would “buzz” a town in their aircraft – fly low to get the townspeople’s attention and 

then fly off towards the nearest open field. There they would exhibit stunts of parachute jumping, wing walking, low 

dives and dangerously daring maneuvers in the air. The performance usually culminated in taking an eager 

passenger up for a brief ride in the plane for a fee of $1 to $5, depending on the reputation and the skill of the pilot. 

At day’s end, the pilots would locate a barn in which to board themselves and the plane for the night.” See 

Freydberg, Bessie Coleman, 85. 
23

 Margaret Whitman Blair, The Roaring Twenty. The First Cross-Country Air Race for Women (Washington: 

National Geographic, 2006), 23. 
24

 See Kathleen Brooks-Pazmany, United States Women in Aviation 1919-1929 (Washington: Smithsonian 

Institution Press 1983), 5-7. 
25

 Phoebe Fairgrave, for instance, joined ex-military pilot Glenn Messer’s flying circus. She wing walked and 

performed parachute jumps to be able to pay for her flying lessons. When she had earned enough money, she opened 

the ‘Phoebe Fairgrave Flying Circus.’ She married pilot Vernon Omlie in 1922 and together they stayed in the 

barnstorming business until they were able to establish their more lucrative Mid-South Airlines company in 

Memphis, Tennessee. Brooks-Pazmany, United States Women in Aviation 1919-1929, 5-7.  



129 

 

better activity symbolized the freedom and power which was lacking in their daily lives.”
26

 This 

sentiment certainly permeated Earhart’s and other female pilots’ writings about their exploits. In 

1928, pilot Margery Brown, for example, informed her readers that flying was more symbolic to 

women than to men. Whereas flying to men was merely mechanical, she said, for women, “it 

seems to signify rising above their environment in one way or another,” symbolizing “freedom 

from the irking limitations that have hedged them about for so many centuries.”
27

 

Considerable controversy existed about women’s ‘proper’ role in this new field of 

endeavour. While women were generally accepted and often celebrated in their roles as stunt 

flyers and aerial performers, they were looked down upon when they wanted to become pilots 

themselves in order to gain a foothold in the aviation business. Popularly held views about 

women’s lesser intelligence and inferior biology caused great difficulty for female pilots, as it 

was generally accepted that women’s lack of technical knowledge and inability to concentrate 

for long stretches of time made them incapable of flying. Their inherent nervous nature would 

inevitably cause them to crash.
28

 Women were also considered biologically incapable of flying 

during their menstrual periods, an argument used to explain airplane crashes, as well as to keep 

women away from jobs as airline pilots in the 1930s.
29  

                                                 
26

 Jospeph J. Corn, “Making Flying ‘Thinkable’: Women Pilots and the Selling of Aviation 1927-1940,” American 

Quarterly 31 (4) (1979): 558; Joseph  J. Corn, The Winged  ospe . America’s Romance with Aviation, 1900-1950 

(New York: Oxford University Press 1983), 75.  
27

 Margery Brown, “Women and Flying,”Popular Aviation, August 1928, 44. See also Karen Piper, “The Gendered 

Aerial Perspective,” in Cartographic Fictions. Maps, Race, and Identity, 65-94 (New Brunswick, New Jersey, and 

London, 2002), 74.  
28

 Corn, The Winged Gospel, 76. See also Margery Brown, “What Men Flyers Think of Women Pilots”, Popular 

Aviation (March 1929), 62.   
29

 Illustrative in this context is George Palmer Putnam’s quote in Earhart’s biography: “The medical officers held to 

the conviction that this [that women had a time every month when their nerves and reactions were thrown out of 

balance] was bound to be true, and nothing could be done about it. Individual medical history made no difference. 

Clinical tests made no difference. It was just a fact, and how could full transport dependability be expected in the 

face of it? Putnam, Soaring Wings,62. 



130 

 

As the American public became increasingly captivated by the promise of aviation 

technology, airplane manufacturers realized they could capitalize on this new niche market. One 

of the main obstacles, however, was the discrepancy between the nation’s enthusiasm about 

aviation and the actual application of the technology. Few were brave enough to take a ride in the 

unstable-looking and rather flimsy airplane models and most preferred to marvel at stunt flyers’ 

performances from the safety of the ground. The onlookers’ fear was not without reason, as 

airplane crashes, often with deadly effects, were common. It was on the nexus of the dangerous 

nature of aviation in the 1920s, women’s enthusiasm for flying and the generally held beliefs 

about women’s inferior flying capabilities that aircraft manufacturers found a new strategy to 

promote aviation. Under the motto ‘if a woman is capable of flying, it must be safe and easy,’ 

aircraft manufacturers hired female pilots to promote the safety and reliability of their planes.
30

 

Female aviators thus had to maintain a balance between the opportunities offered by 

manufacturers and their personal attitudes regarding the gender roles assigned to them in the 

male-dominated aviation industry.   

Regardless of the industry’s questionable strategy, many women pilots became aviation 

promoters and considered it their task to encourage America to become more ‘airminded.’
31

 

‘Airmindedness,’ it was believed, was something that had to be incorporated in one’s lifestyle, 

and would enable the nation to adequately prepare for the promising age of aviation. As Corn so 

brilliantly illustrates in The Winged Gospel (1983), aviation in the 1920s and 1930s took on the 

allure of a new religion, something that would make America a better place. Women, in this 

                                                 
30

 Pilot Louise Thaden, for example, was an airplane salesperson; Blanche Noyes flew as a company pilot for 

Standard Oil of Ohio before accepting a piloting position with the United States Department of Commerce; and 

Amelia Earhart sold airplanes, piloted aircraft on publicity tours for manufacturers and also promoted airlines. See 

Corn, “Making Flying Thinkable,” 556-57. 
31

 According to Susan Ware, “Being “air-minded” entailed “having enthusiasm for airplanes, believing in their 

potential to better human life, and supporting aviation development.” Ware, Still Missing, 62. 



131 

 

context were aviation’s missionaries. They had to educate the public about the applications and 

advantages of aviation. To fulfill this mission, they presented flying as an extension of women’s 

alleged nurturing function, as something that would facilitate family life and could be executed 

on a daily basis like other household responsibilities. In addition, it was believed that aviation 

should be implemented in every school’s curriculum. An illustration of this tendency towards 

“aerial domesticity,”
32

 as Corn labels it, was provided by aviator Barbara Southgate in 1934: 

If she can do it, then flying cannot be dangerous as it has a reputation for being. If 

she can do it, then it must be safe for my son and daughter to learn to fly. Thus 

good work can be done for the future of aviation through educational efforts. Who 

can better perform this task than our girl pilots? Who can better reach the mothers, 

the women’s colleges, the women’s clubs, and the high schools to aid the world in 

developing this comparatively new industry? … Our high schools have gone air-

minded. Many of them have formed aero-clubs that are actively interested in 

aeronautics. Some high schools even have girls’ flying clubs. Colleges have their 

clubs. The day is not far distant when the schools will offer courses in aviation 

and aeronautical engineering even as the universities are doing.
33

  

 

Not only was it suggested that all schools would offer courses in aeronautics, it was also believed 

that the airplane itself would fulfill a significant role in everyday life. “There is a distinct place in 

American aviation for the “family ship,” the personal plane, piloted by the owner, or his son or 

his daughter, as the family car is operated today,” the North American Review stated in 1928.
34

 

Likewise, Earhart predicted that the “family car of today will be the family plane of 

tomorrow.”
35

 

 Attempts to preach airmindedness and increase the nation’s aviation enthusiasm were 

directed only at a white and rather privileged audience in the United States. There was no such 

thing as a ‘winged gospel’ for African Americans who might aspire to play a part in the 

                                                 
32

 Corn, “Making Flying “Thinkable”,” 564.  
33

 Barbara Southgate, “Not in Competition with Men,” Airwoman 2 (1) (1934): 4. 
34

 C. D. Chamberlin, “Shall We All Fly Soon?,” North American Review 226 (4) (1928): 410.  
35

 Amelia Earhart, “Try Flying Yourself,” Hearst’s Internationa -Cosmopolitan, November 1928, 35. 



132 

 

American aviation industry. Several African American inventors had experimented with 

designing, building and flying airplanes prior to World War I, but their efforts went unreported 

by the white aviation industry and remain largely unknown even today.
36

 During World War I, 

Eugene Bullard was the only African American who served as a military pilot.
37

 Bullard began 

his career as a boxer in Liverpool, England and in 1913, was provided the opportunity to fight in 

Paris where he decided to stay. In 1915, having left the boxing circuit, Bullard joined the French 

Foreign Legion and won the Croix de Guerre, the highest French military honour while serving 

as an infantry soldier. In 1916, he transferred to the French Flying Service and flew combat 

missions as a member of the French-American air squadron, the Lafayette Escadrille.
38

 Although 

Bullard was an incredibly skilled fighter pilot and was credited with the destruction of two 

German aircraft, he was forced to leave the squadron when the United States entered the war in 

1917 and the Lafayette Escadrille became part of the United States Army Service. Thus, his 

career as a fighter pilot was ended, as African Americans were not allowed to fly in the United 

States military.
39

 There would not be another certified African American pilot until 1921.  

 

Dreams of Flight 

 A racially motivated violent incident on June 1, 1921, commonly referred to as the ‘Tulsa 

race riot,’ greatly affected and shaped African American’s perceptions of aviation. An 

unresolved lynching incident sparked a much more violent attack the next morning when six 

                                                 
36

 Robert Jakeman, “America’s Black Air Pioneers” (Unpublished Dissertation, Maxwell Air Force Base Alabama 

1988), 3-5. See also Von Hardesty, Black Wings. Courageous Stories of African Americans in Aviation and Space 

History (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008); and Samuel Broadnax, Blue Skies, Black Wings (Westport, 

Connecticut: Praeger, 2007) 
37

 Jacqueline L. Harris, The Tuskegee Airmen. Black Heroes of World War II (Parsippany, New Jersey: Dillon Press, 

1996), 8, 18-19; Jakeman, “America’s Black Air Pioneers,” 4-5.  
38

 Jakeman, “America’s Black Air Pioneers,” 4; Jill D. Snider, “Flying to Freedom: African-American Visions of 

Aviation, 1910-1927,”(Unpublished Dissertation, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 1995), 35-36.  
39

 Harris, The Tuskegee Airmen, 8, 18-19. 



133 

 

airplanes, dispatched from the nearby Curtis flying field and piloted by white men, set the 

Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma, on fire and killed 75 Tulsans, two-thirds of whom were 

black. It was the first time in history that airplanes were used to attack a black community,
 
and 

the incident generated much debate about the dangers for African Americans in the coming 

aviation age. There was much fear that the airplane, in white men’s hands, could result in the 

extermination of the African American race.
40

  

According to Snider, two main philosophies emerged in the riot’s aftermath. The Garvey 

Movement, established by the Black Nationalist leader Marcus Garvey, focused primarily on the 

airplane as a menace and a tool of the white man for controlling the African American race. 

Anticipating a great race war, Garvey encouraged African Americans to become involved in 

aviation and to secure as many airplanes as possible. Adopting an apocalyptic undertone, he was 

convinced that the Tulsa incident was just the beginning, and that if African Americans did not 

take action immediately, it would lead to their elimination. The Chicago Defender, the 

Pittsburgh Courier and the Baltimore Afro-American all entertained a more constructive and 

positive perspective, promoting aviation as an opportunity for African Americans to take 

advantage of the budding aviation industry, rather than viewing it as a menace. By learning how 

to fly, African Americans would not only be able to become part of the ‘winged gospel’ of 

mainstream society, but would also dispel stereotypes about their lesser intelligence, 

incompetence and lack of ambition.
41

 It was Bessie Coleman who would become the promoter 

and, indeed, the personification of this latter view.  

                                                 
40

 Jill D. Snider, “ “Great Shadow in the Sky” The Airplane in the Tulsa Riot of 1921 and the Development of 

African American Visions of Aviation, 1921-1926,” in The Airplane in American Culture, ed. Dominick A. Pisano 

(Ann Arbor, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press  2006), 105, 112.  
41 

Snider, “Great Shadow in the Sky,” 115.  



134 

 

Bessie Coleman was born in 1892 in Atlanta, Texas, the twelfth of thirteen children.
42

 

Like many African Americans who fled from the racist and increasingly violent climate in the 

segregated South with the hope finding a better life in the more ‘progressive’ North, Coleman 

went to Chicago in 1915. Like her mother, who had always encouraged her children to pursue 

their interests despite the poor circumstances in which they lived, Coleman showed 

determination and business acumen in everything she undertook. Her entrepreneurial skills were 

remarked upon by the Chicago Defender shortly after she began work as a manicurist at a 

barbershop where she won a contest as the best and fastest manicurist in black Chicago.
43

 The 

Defender reported that Coleman was “an example of what a progressive up-to-date young 

woman should be” and that she “should be an inspiration to other young women who 

contemplate following the same line of endeavour.”
44

 Referring to her successes as a manicurist, 

Coleman’s name would appear several more times in the Defender, although she soon left the 

barbershop scene for pursuits that were perhaps more exciting and exclusive, such as flying an 

airplane – not a surprising development, given her desire for entrepreneurial opportunities, her 

energy, and her zest for life.  

Like many other Americans, Bessie Coleman was enthralled by the burgeoning aviation 

industry. Not only did the stories about aviators in World War I that she heard from her male 

clientele in the barbershop arouse her interest,
45

 but her two older brothers, John and Walter, who 

had both served in France as soldiers, also told her about their fascination with airplanes and 

                                                 
42

 Controversy exists around Coleman’s date of birth. Although her sister Elois Patterson writes in her memoirs that 

Coleman was born in 1893 and while her pilot license indicates 1896, most sources refer to 1892 as Coleman’s 

correct year of birth. 
43

 Doris L. Rich, Queen Bess Daredevil Aviator (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 14, 19-20. See 

also K. Creasman, “Black Birds in the Sky: The Legacies of Bessie Coleman and Dr. Mae Jemison,” The Journal of 

Negro History 82 (1)(1997): 158-68. 
44 

Chicago Defender, “Miss Bessie Coleman Among the First to Clamp on “Flu” Lid,” November 2, 1918.  
45

 Freydberg, Bessie Coleman, 179. 



135 

 

flying. They also mentioned that there were several French women who had learned to fly, not 

thinking that this would ever be a possibility for their sister.
46

 Coleman increasingly developed a 

desire to fly and while her motives for attaining that goal were somewhat obscure, it would later 

become clear that Coleman would use her skills as both a pilot and an entrepreneur to actively 

promote aviation among African Americans.  

Coleman had a strong personality and was determined to pursue her goals regardless of 

other people’s advice. She clearly did not follow the usual path dictated for a woman of her age 

and background. When she married Claude Glenn in 1917, who was fourteen years her senior, 

she did not inform any of her close family members, and it is not clear whether Coleman and 

Glenn ever actually lived together. According to her niece Marion, Coleman was an attractive 

woman who had various relationships with both black and white men.
47

 Because she was 

relatively light-skinned, she was able to “make herself up to look like different nationalities,” the 

wife of one of Coleman’s brothers noted.
48

 It must also be noted that most of the small number 

of photographs taken of Coleman still circulating today, do not give away Coleman’s racial 

identity. Not only is her black curly hair covered by her flying cap and goggles, but her skin 

colour seems purposefully lightened. The blurring of performers’ racial identity, often 

emphasizing identification with the supposedly superior white European race, was certainly not 

unusual. Jazz dancer Josephine Baker and her photographers, for example, seemed to adopt 

similar strategies, darkening or lightening her skin colour depending on whether the picture had 

to convey black exoticism or white European ‘sophistication.’ It is not certain, however, to 

which extent Coleman promoted herself as ‘white.’ Like trapeze artists Miss Lala (1858-?) for 

                                                 
46

 Rich, Queen Bess Daredevil Aviator, 26-27.  
47

 Ibid., 23, 31.  
48

 Ibid., pp. 3, 80.  



136 

 

example, whose skin colour was deliberately lightened by French painter Edgard Dégas,
49

 

Coleman’s photographers may also have played with her skin colour’s shades.  

Undoubtedly, Coleman’s business acumen and her good looks facilitated her aviation 

career. Willet, in her paper on the history of manicurists, takes it one step further by suggesting 

that in the 1910s and 1920s, many male patrons saw little difference between a female manicurist 

and a saloon girl or prostitute, and suggests that Coleman developed relationships with Chicago’s 

most powerful and influential men while working in the barbershop. No doubt, she writes, many 

men “found her an object of titillation.”
50

Although there is no evidence as to how exactly 

Coleman was able to secure funds, it is clear that she was able to establish various connections 

with influential businessmen who encouraged her to become involved in aviation and financially 

supported her plans to fly.    

One of these businessmen was Robert Abbott, the wealthy editor of the Chicago 

Defender and an ardent promoter of the advancement of African Americans. He shared a vision 

with Coleman that African Americans should be encouraged to take an interest in aviation. He 

also wanted to promote his newspaper, and in Coleman he saw the perfect candidate for boosting 

the public’s interest in the Defender. Whether Abbott genuinely believed in Coleman’s abilities 

or whether he simply saw the unusual story of an attractive young woman attempting to fly as an 

opportunity to increase his revenues is not clear. It was Abbott and, presumably, African 

American philanthropist Jesse Binga, founder of the Binga State Bank, who provided Coleman 

with the initial funds necessary to pursue her ambitious plans. According to Freydberg, Binga 

                                                 
49

 See Marilyn R. Brown, “ “Miss Lala’s” Teeth: Reflections on Degas and “Race,” The Art Bulletin 89 (4) (2007): 

738-65. 
50

 Julie Willet, “Hands Across the Table.” A Short History of the Manicurist in the Twentieth Century,” Journal of 

Women’s Histor  17 (3) (2005): 63.  



137 

 

and Abbott were the benefactors behind the practical business pursuits that were established by 

many prominent African American during the early 1920s.
51

  

 

On a Mission to France  

At the time that Coleman wanted to learn to fly, there were no other African American 

aviators and almost all flying schools in the United States were operated by white men.
52

 None 

of them accepted black candidates and only a small number of schools accepted women. 

Moreover, the few schools that did accept women often had little confidence in a female pupil’s 

abilities. “Instructors start in with a prejudice, and the woman student labours under a decided 

handicap,” asserted aviator Louise Thaden.
53

 Flying lessons were expensive, so the few women 

who were able to enroll in aviation classes often had difficulties in finding the necessary 

resources to buy and maintain an airplane once the instruction period was over. Unlike their 

male counterparts, who were able to work as mechanics at airports to pay off their flying lessons 

or to buy an airplane, aspiring female pilots most often were not welcomed in such positions.
54

 

“No one wants a feminine ‘grease monkey’ around the hangar to do the odd jobs which may 

partly pay for a young man’s aviation training,” Earhart pointed out.
55

 Also, while men wanting 

                                                 
51

 Freydberg, Bessie Coleman, 72-74; Rich, Queen Bess Daredevil Aviator, 29-30. 
52

 A recent article recalls the adventures of African American pilot Emory Malick, who was probably the first 

African American to gain a pilot license (March 1912) from the Curtiss Aviation School on North Island, San 

Diego. It is unclear whether he still practiced flying when Bessie Coleman received her license in 1921 in France. 

This fact is remarkable as Bessie Coleman was unable to obtain a license in the United States. See Black Pilots of 

America, “The Unrecognized First,” April 2011.  
53

 Louise M. Thaden, “Training Women Pilots,” Western Flying, February 1931, 22. 
54

 Corn, “Making Flying ‘Thinkable’,” 563.  
55

 Amelia Earhart, The Fun of It, Random Records of My Own Flying And of Women in Aviation (Chicago: Academy 

Chicago Publishers, 1977), 145. An exception, however, was Florence Klingensmith. She attended electrical ground 

school as the only girl among four hundred boys. She worked as a mechanic apprentice and “through dirt and 

grease” she worked her way to one solo flight out of every six hours of instruction. Clara Studer (ed), “Women Can 

Fly Too,” The Ninety-Niner 12 (1933):1-2. 



138 

 

to learn how to fly could enlist in the army or navy and receive both free instruction and a salary, 

this was not an option for women.
56

  

Because learning how to fly was impossible for Coleman in the United States, Abbott 

encouraged her to try to find a flying school in France, the country that had offered Eugene 

Bullard his flight training in 1917. Interwar France, and Paris in particular, was attractive to 

black musicians, singers, dancers, athletes and other types of performers because it was 

generally perceived to be “a color-blind land of tolerance”
57

 that provided both venues and 

enthusiastic audiences for their performances. Coleman was not the first among her fellow 

country(wo)men to go to Paris in the hope of finding opportunities in Europe’s supposedly more 

welcoming and less overtly racist climate. Like Bullard, who went to Paris to box in the 

European circuit, Texan boxer Jack Johnson tried his luck as a boxer and vaudeville performer in 

Europe earlier on (1908-1915).
58

 Another of Coleman’s contemporaries, Josephine Baker, 

started her career as a member of the infamous Broadway musical Shuffle Along (1921) before 

opening her own cabaret in France in 1925, revolutionizing the Parisian entertainment scenery 

with her erotic, almost nude, dance performances.
59

 France was not only a popular site for staged 

entertainment, it was also a hub for barnstormers and other aviation enthusiasts in the 1920s. The 

country had been the first to host an international air meet in 1909 in Reims, and was well 

known for its numerous aviation pioneers and the good reputation of its aircraft manufacturers.
60

 

                                                 
56

 Earhart, “Try Flying Yourself,” 158. 
57

 Karen C. C. Dalton and Henry L. Gates, Jr., “Josephine Baker and Paul Colin: African American Dance Seen 

through Parisian Eyes, Critical Inquiry 24 (4) (1998): 904.  
58

 See for instance Arthur Ashe, A Hard Road to Glory: The African American Athlete in Boxing (New York, N.Y.: 

Amistad, 1993). 
59

 Dalton and Gates, “Josephine Baker and Paul Colin”; See also Elisabeth Ezra, “A Colonial Princess. Josephine 

Baker’s French Films,” in The Colonial Unconscious. Race and Culture in Interwar France (Ithaca and London : 

Cornell University Press, 2000), 97-128.  
60

 See Luc Robène, Dominique Bodin and Stéphane Héas, “Pau et l’Invention de l’Aviation ‘Sportive’ (1908-1910). 

Des Enjeux Technologiques aux Plaisirs Mondains: Naissance d'Un Loisir et Nouveaux Pouvoirs du Corps,” Revue 



139 

 

Coleman’s career thus took off at the crossroads of aviation’s popularity as form of 

entertainment in both France and the United States, and France’s more welcoming attitude 

towards African Americans. 

In November 1920, Coleman sailed for France.
61

 She visited several flying schools near 

Paris, though flight instructors there tried to discourage her from taking up flying because two 

other women had recently died in a crash during practice.
62

 Although many men had lost their 

lives while flying, the sport was considered too dangerous for women. Coleman was still 

determined to earn her license and finally found the Caudron School of Aviation that was willing 

to accept her. René and Gaston Caudron had opened their flying school in 1912 in Le Crotoy,
63

 

near the bay of the Somme, where long stretches of sandy beach offered an excellent base for 

take-offs and landings.
64

 The school had been closed during the war and reopened in 1919. The 

brothers wanted to attract students to their flying school, so they kept the tariffs for lessons low 

and they also welcomed women.
65

 Coleman completed the ten-month course requirements and 

passed her exams at the Caudron School. On June 15, 1921, after passing the strict FAI 

examination, she earned the first international pilot license (No. 18.310) ever awarded to an 

African American woman.
66

  

                                                                                                                                                             
Internationale des Sciences du Sport et de l'Education Physique 87 (2010) : 13-31; James M. Laux, “The Rise and 

Fall of Armand Deperdussin,” French Historical Studies 8 (1) (1973), 95-104 ; Thomas Ameye, Bieke Gils and 

Pascal Delheye, “Belgian Pioneers in Rally Racing and Aerial Sports during the Belle Époque,” The International 

Journal for the History of Sport 28 (2) (2011) : 205-39. 
61

 Freydberg, Bessie Coleman, 72-74; Rich, Queen Bess Daredevil Aviator, 29-30.  
62

 Chicago Defender, “Aviatrix Must Sign Away Life to Learn Trade,” October 8, 1921.   
63

 Le Crotoy is a village by the North Sea, approximately 250 kilometres North of Paris. 
64

 Jacques Béal, Bessie  o eman L’Ange Noir (Paris: Editions Michalon 2008), 73-74.  
65

 Ibid., p. 75. 
66

 Chicago Defender, “Chicago Girl is Full-Fledged Aviator Now,” October 1, 1921; Chicago Defender, “Aviatrix 

Must Sign Away Life to Learn Trade,” October 8, 1921; Freydberg, Bessie Coleman, 82.  



140 

 

 

Image 5: Bessie Coleman’s French pilot license. Courtesy of the National Air and Space 

Museum, Smithsonian Institution. 

 

Later that year, approximately four months after the atrocities in Greenwood, Tulsa, 

Coleman went back to Chicago. Much hope now lay with her, as she was the only black pilot in 

the United States and was already perceived as a successful woman by the black community. The 

Shuffle Along musical company welcomed her with a cup “as a token of their appreciation of her 

achievement in aviation.”
67

 Coleman had become the African American winged gospel’s 

missionary – almost literally an angel from the sky – who held together the belief that there was 

a future for African Americans in aviation. Playing up her own courage and the perceived urge 

for African Americans to enter aviation and catch up with white pilots, Coleman told a Chicago 

Defender reporter: 

                                                 
67

 Chicago Defender, “ ‘Shuffle Along’ Company Gives Fair Flyer Cup,” October 8, 1921.  



141 

 

Well, … I knew we had no aviators, neither men nor women, and I knew the 

Race needed to be represented among this most important line, so I thought it 

my duty to risk my life to learn aviating and to encourage flying among men and 

women of the Race who are so far behind the white men in this special line.
68

 

 

Despite her enthusiasm and the black community’s confidence in her abilities, Coleman’s plans 

did not run smoothly. In order to locate an airplane and a flying field for her shows in the United 

States, she had to rely on the white aviation community. Yet few white newspapers picked up her 

remarkable story. White aviators and owners of airfields either did not know her or simply chose 

to ignore her because of their lack of confidence in the flying abilities of a black woman, and 

thus her aspirations for a flying show did not materialize.
69

 On February 22, 1922, Coleman 

sailed back to France in the hope of finding a solution there.
70

 It is not clear how she was able to 

fund this second trip, but “in circumstances different from her first departure,” Rich points out, 

“Bessie now had not only chic Paris gowns and attractive leather flying apparel but much 

favorable newspaper exposure, especially from hometown supporter Robert Abbott’s Chicago 

Defender.”
71

  

 

Missionary, Entrepreneur, Entertainer 

 Upon her arrival back in New York on August 14, 1922, having spent approximately six 

months abroad, Coleman was not only welcomed by African American reporters, but also by 

those of the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune.
72

 The news about her success in Europe 

                                                 
68

 New York Times, “Negro Aviatrix Arrives,” August 14, 1922. 
69

 Freydberg, Bessie Coleman, 83.  
70

 Chicago Defender, “Bessie Coleman Leaves New York for France,” February 25 1922; Rich, Queen Bess 

Daredevil Aviator, 39. 
71

 Rich, Queen Bess Daredevil Aviator, 39. It needs to be mentioned that information on Coleman’s time abroad is 

hard to find and that also her biographers - of whom one, Jacques Béal, is French - remain rather unspecific on this 

particular episode in Coleman’s life. The information that is available is largely based on the accounts of the 

Chicago Defender.  
72

 Freydberg, Bessie Coleman, 83-85.  



142 

 

must have reached the United States before her arrival, as it certainly sparked the curiosity of the 

white newspapers. The New York Times announced that the “Negro aviatrix” had arrived and 

enthusiastically reported on Coleman’s accomplishments abroad:  

Termed by leading French and Dutch aviators one of the best flyers they had 

seen, Miss Bessie Coleman, said to be the only negro aviatrix in the world, 

returned from Europe yesterday to give a series of exhibitions in this country, 

particularly among her own people. At Staaken, the flying field outside Berlin, 

Miss Coleman, without any instruction, flew a 220-horsepower Benz motored L. 

F. G. plane, winning for herself, according to documents she brought back, the 

distinction of having piloted the largest plane ever flown by a woman. German 

newspapers spoke in high terms of her ability. Miss Coleman visited 

Amsterdam, where she flew planes manufactured by Anthony G. H. Fokker, and 

at Friedrichshafen she gave a series of flights in a Dornier flying boat.
73

  

 

A similar report in the Chicago Defender added that “Queen Bess:” 

 

...had been proclaimed by experts at the art of flying in France, Germany, 

Holland and Switzerland as the greatest aviatrix in the world, even surpassing 

the marvellous record made by the famous Ruth Law.... Miss Coleman 

possesses her own plane, a Fokker C-2, which she brought with her from 

Holland. Several other machines have been ordered for instruction purposes. 

She will import European pilots as teachers of the profession. While waiting for 

her equipment from abroad Miss Coleman will travel throughout the United 

States and the pan-American countries.
74

 

 

The airplanes Coleman was said to have ordered never arrived, but the favourable 

acknowledgements of her accomplishments by both black and white newspapers now enabled 

the organization of her long-planned flying shows. It would not prove an easy task, however, to 

balance expectations from black audiences, white audiences, managers and other individuals 

who tried to capitalize on her success while simultaneously finding enough financial support to 

buy airplanes and organize air shows.  

                                                 
73

 New York Times, “Negro Aviatrix Arrives,” August 14, 1922.  
74

 Chicago Defender, “Bessie to Fly Over Gotham,” August. 26, 1922.  



143 

 

 In an attempt to pursue her goals in aviation, Coleman had to play several roles. Not only 

did she have to fulfill her position as an aviation missionary or crusader as Snider points out, but 

also as an entrepreneur and an entertainer.
75

 These roles frequently conflicted and they made 

Coleman’s motivations often seem controversial. This happened mostly when companies tried to 

lure Coleman into some kind of lucrative project that would offer her financial support, but was 

at the same time disrespectful of her personal ambitions and background. The manner in which 

Coleman negotiated these opportunities that also imposed restrictions on her ambitions is best 

illustrated in the ways she organized her shows, entertained both black and white audiences and 

interacted with her managers.  

By the end of August 1922, with Abbott as her sponsor and publicity manager, Coleman 

had established headquarters at the Chicago Defender’s offices in New York to book her 

barnstorming exhibitions.
76

 For her first exhibition, on September 3, 1922, at the Curtiss airfield 

in Garden City, Long Island (New York), the Glenn Curtiss Company, the largest aircraft 

manufacturer in the United States, lent her one of its airplanes.
77

 “Beyond question, this event will 

be the greatest attraction ever staged in America,” the Chicago Defender asserted, guaranteeing 

that the “wonderful little woman, the only aviatrix of the Race, will do heart-thrilling stunts that 

will be astounding.”
78

 The newspaper also promised “eight other sensational flights by American 

aces,” as well as “giant passenger planes holding 16 or more passengers in which sightseeing 

flights by the public will be made.”
79

  

                                                 
75

 Snider, “Flying to Freedom,” 135, 138.  
76

 Chicago Defender, “Bessie to Fly Over Gotham,” August 26, 1922; Hadley Freydberg, Bessie Coleman, p. 86; 

Rich, Queen Bess Daredevil Aviator, p. 48. 
77

 For more information on Glenn Curtiss, one of the most influential airplane manufacturers at the time, see C. R. 

Roseberry, Glenn Curtiss, Pioneer of Flight (Syracuse, New York 1999).  
78

 Chicago Defender, “Rain Halts the Initial Flight of Miss Bessie,” September 2, 1922.  
79

 Ibid.  



144 

 

Revealing her talent as a brilliant entertainer, Coleman did not disappoint her audience. 

She arranged a show that appealed to both white and black audiences by playing on America’s 

patriotism in general and on the promotion of African Americans in particular. She staged the 

show in honour of the Fifteenth New York Infantry, the first African American regiment sent to 

France during World War I, which was comprised primarily of jazz musicians and theatre 

practitioners. Although the regiment no longer existed, the Fifteenth’s regimental band, known for 

introducing Europe to brass-band jazz, was still operational.
80

 After the band played The Star 

Spangled Banner, Coleman, dressed in breeches and a French officer’s jacket with a Sam Brown 

belt, went up twice “to the delight of the hundreds of enthusiasts of both races.”
81

 Although stunt 

flying was not allowed on Curtiss field and Coleman could not perform the aerial tricks she had 

learned in Europe, her show proved a spectacular success. In addition, while the eight promised 

American aces did not make an appearance,
82

 Hubert Fauntleroy Julian, a black aviation 

enthusiast and parachute jumper from Trinidad, “thrilled the spectators with a parachute drop 

from a Curtiss plane from over 2,000 feet in the air and landed without injury.”
83

 This jump would 

be the beginning of Julian’s own aviation career.
84

 

                                                 
80

 Amelia Elisabeth Hadley Freydberg, “Bessie Coleman: Original Fierce Flying Sistah,” Abafazi: The Simmons 

College Journal of Women of African Descent 7 (1) (1996): 10; The Chicago Defender, “Rain Halts the Initial Flight 

of Miss Bessie,” September 2, 1922. The doughboys here refer to American infantrymen who served during World 

War I.  
81

 Hadley Freydberg, “Bessie Coleman,” 10; Chicago Defender, “Bessie Gets Away; Does Her Stuff,” September 9, 

1922, 3.  
82

 Rich, Queen Bess Daredevil Aviator, 49. 
83

 Chicago Defender, “Bessie Gets Away; Does Her Stuff,” September 9, 1922. According to Freydberg, “… Hubert 

Faunterloy Julian, an officer of Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association of New York, dressed in a bright 

red outfit, joined her in the cockpit. (p. 10) Julian was a flamboyant, wealthy, adventuresome young man born in 

Port of Spain, Trinidad, a year after Coleman’s birth. He had arrived in Harlem in July 1921, by way of Canada, 

with the intent of becoming a pilot. Julian had not yet earned the title of “Black Eagle.” His aviation career was 

launched when he parachuted from the wing of Coleman’s airplane at approximately 1,500-2,000 feet in the air 

during this event.” (p. 11) See, Freyberg, “Bessie Coleman: Original Fierce Flying Sistah.”  
84

 Freyberg, “Bessie Coleman,” 11.  



145 

 

In September 1922, Coleman returned to Chicago, where she began preparations for her 

second airshow, which was to be held at the Checkerboard Aerodrome a month later. The 

Defender announced that “an elaborate program of special flights has been arranged for “Queen 

Bess,” whose daredevil flying amazed continental Europe and was applauded in Paris, Berlin and 

Munich.”
85 

This time, Coleman performed stunts, including figure eights in honour of the African 

American Eighth Illinois Infantry regiment.
86

 While the regiment band entertained the audience 

with jazz music, Coleman executed several stunts named after famous flying aces. She took off, 

for example, with a “French Nungesser start,” referring to France’s third-ranking World War I 

fighter pilot, Charles Nungesser. According to Freydberg, this stunt consisted of staying low to 

the ground during take-off and dipping the plane close to the audience before ascending into the 

air.
87

 In this same flight, the Defender wrote, “the Spansih [sic] Bertha Costa Climb was made and 

the American Curtis McMullen turn, the Eddie Rickenbacker straighten-up, the Richtofer-German 

glide and the Ralph C. Diggings landing were featured.”
88

 The “Bertha Costa Climb” referred to 

American (not Spanish) pilot Bertrand B. Costa.
89

 American Eddie Rickenbacker, German 

Manfred von Richthofen and American (Chicagoan) Ralph Diggins were all World War I flying 

aces, credited with several air combat victories.
90

 In addition to Coleman’s stunts, the Defender 

had also announced a “drop of death,” or parachute jump, by Coleman’s sister Georgia.
91

 

According to Freydberg, Bessie had not instructed her sister about how to perform a parachute 

                                                 
85

 Chicago Defender “ “Queen Bess” to Try Air October 15,” October 7, 1922.  
86

 Ibid.  
87

 Chicago Defender, “Bessie Coleman Makes Initial Aerial Flight,” October 21, 1922; Freydberg, “Bessie 

Coleman,” 11.  
88

 Chicago Defender, “Bessie Coleman Makes Initial Aerial Flight,” October 21, 1922.  
89

 Rich, Queen Bess Daredevil Aviator, 49. 
90

 Freydberg, “Bessie Coleman,” 11.  
91

 Chicago Defender ““Queen Bess” to Try Air October 15,” October 7, 1922. 



146 

 

jump until the actual moment she was supposed to jump out of the plane, so Georgia refused.
92

 

According to Rich, however, Bessie had discussed the jump with Georgia the night before and it 

was then that she refused. Regardless of what actually happened, the fact that Coleman seemed to 

trust that her sister would be able to perform a parachute jump without prior instruction illustrates 

her adventure-seeking, daredevil personality. It did not seem to occur to her that not everyone 

shared her delight in such risky stunts.  

Coleman’s shows were successful in that she was able to provide entertainment for both 

black and white audiences. Whereas white audiences may have perceived Coleman as an 

attraction per se – seeing a black woman performing aerial stunts was a spectacular novelty. For 

the black community, her shows symbolized courage and hope for African American’s increased 

involvement in aviation. To foster courage and to inspire African Americans to take aviation 

seriously, Coleman presented herself as a strong-minded, fearless woman. The military outfits she 

wore for her exhibitions not only symbolized her deep respect for both the black and white 

individuals who had fought in the war, but also emphasized the seriousness with which she 

undertook the role of aviation’s advocate.  

Unquestionably, the media played a major part in the construction of Coleman’s persona 

as a brave and intrepid African American woman. Unlike white female pilots, whose femininity 

was emphasized in the media by calling them “lady fliers,” “angels,” “sweethearts of the air” or 

“flying flappers,”
93

 references made to Coleman by white newspapers were less playful, often 

impersonal and usually pointed to her racialized identity.
94

 Headlines such as “First Colored 

                                                 
92

 Freydberg, “Bessie Coleman,” 11; Freydberg, Bessie Coleman, 88.  
93

 Frances Drewry McMullen, “The First Women’s Air Derby, An Interview with Amelia Earhart,” The Woman’s 

Journal, October 1929, 38.  
94

 Bix, “Bessie Coleman Race and Gender Realities Behind Aviation Dreams,” 11.  



147 

 

Aviatrix,”
95

 “Negress an Air Pilot,”
96

 “Colored Woman a Licensed Pilot”
97

 or “Negro Aviatrix 

Arrives”
98

 were frequently used. As Higginbotham has noted, “Ladies,” as white female aviators 

were often termed, “were not merely women; they represented a class, a differentiated status 

within the generic category of “women”. … But no black woman, regardless of income, 

education, refinement, or character enjoyed the status of lady.”
99

 Also, as Cahn has pointed out, 

“womanliness” in the 1920s was rooted in the privileged position of the “lady,” in contrast to the 

view of black women as “robust, unruly, insensitive in pain or exhaustion, and rough in 

manners.”
100

 At the same time, black newspapers referred to Coleman as “Queen Bess,” “Queen 

of the Air,”
101

 “Bird Woman”
102

 and “pioneer air bird of the race,”
103

 which perhaps also de-

emphasized Coleman’s femininity, but did show respect for her position as a leading figure and an 

advocate for African Americans in aviation. Higginbotham explains that to be called a “race 

leader,” “race woman” or in this case “race aviatrix,” by the black community “was not a sign of 

insult or disapproval…” It was a way for blacks to fashion “race into a cultural identity that 

resisted white hegemonic discourses.”
104

 

A few days after Coleman’s show in Chicago, the Baltimore Afro-American announced 

that she had agreed to star in the film Shadow and Sunshine, to be produced by the African 

                                                 
95

 Philadelphia Tribune, “First Colored Aviatrix,” October 1, 1921.  
96

 Washington Post, “Negress An Air Pilot,” July 4, 1922.  
97

 New Journal and Guide, “U.S. Rule in Virgin Islands Assailed,” July 15, 1922.  
98

 New York Times, “Negro Aviatrix Arrives,” August 14, 1922.  
99

 Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs 17(2) 

(1992): 261. 
100

 Susan Cahn, Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-cent r  Women’s  port (Don Mills, Ontario: 

Maxwell Macmillan, Inc, 1994), 28.  
101

 Chicago Defender, “Bessie to Fly Over Gotham,” August 26, 1922; The Chicago Defender ““Queen Bess” to Try 

Air October 15,” October 7, 1922.  
102

 Baltimore Afro-American, “Bird Woman Falls 300 Feet,” February 9, 1923.  
103

 Pittsburgh Courier, “Death-Defying Bird-Woman,” September 15, 1923.  
104

 Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” 267.  



148 

 

American-owned Seminole Film Company.
105

 “Bessie Coleman, the only colored woman aviatrix, 

will be the featured artist. Supporting her will be about twelve carefully selected and experienced 

movie performers,” the newspaper reported in October 1922.
106

 Although Coleman had indeed 

signed the contract, to the great frustration of the Seminole filmmakers, she did not show up for 

the filming. The production of the film had been delayed, the Baltimore Afro-American wrote 

early December 1922: 

...because of the temperament of that young lady [Bessie Coleman], who after 

coming to New York at the expense of the company, changed her mind and 

abruptly left New York without notice to the director. Six autos filled with a cast 

of thirty people, two photographers and the directors waited in vain for two 

hours on the lady. ... The Seminole is fortunate in that they have obtained the 

services of Miss Bessie Allison, a pretty little girl with both personality and 

theatrical experience, to say nothing of an unmistakable culture and a social 

status that will be an asset to the company.
107

 

 

 The reason Coleman did not show up for the filming remains obscure. According to Rich, 

Coleman was told she would have to dress in ragged clothing, and carry a walking stick and a 

pack on her back to portray an ignorant girl who just arrived in New York.
108

 Coleman clearly 

decided that such an ‘Uncle Tom’
109

 depiction would not further her cause and would not only 

diminish both her personal efforts and remarkable accomplishments, but would also reinforce 

stereotypes about African Americans. Although her withdrawal set her back financially and put 

her reputation at risk, by the end of January 1923, she had taken a job of flying to advertise 

rubber tires for the Californian Coast Tire and Rubber Company of Oakland.
110

  

                                                 
105

 Baltimore Afro-American, “Bessie Coleman to Star in a Seminole Super Film,” October 20, 1922.  
106

 Ibid. 
107

 Ibid.  
108

 Rich, Queen Bess Daredevil Aviator, 57; Béal, Bessie  o eman L’Ange Noir, 109-10.  
109

 As quoted in Rich, Queen Bess Daredevil Aviator, 57.  
110

 Los Angeles Times, “Only One in the World,” January 28, 1923.  



149 

 

With the money Coleman made advertising for the tire company (by dropping leaflets out 

of an airplane, for example), she was able to gather enough funds to buy a Curtiss JN-4 or 

“Jenny,” one of the most commonly used and cheapest airplanes at the time. During an 

exhibition in Santa Monica, California, in February 1923, her motor stalled and the plane dove 

into a crash. Coleman was injured, sustaining a broken leg, fractured ribs, cuts and possibly 

internal injuries.
111

 Fearful that her accident would discourage African Americans from taking up 

flying and concerned that the general public and her sponsors might lose trust in her abilities, 

Coleman claimed that the fact she was still living proved that “flying in the air is no more 

dangerous than riding an automobile on the surface.”
112

 Moreover, despite the reality that she 

had not only lost her plane but also had to recover from severe injuries, Coleman urged the 

Chicago Defender to inform her fans that she would come back.
113

 To support her, the Defender 

insinuated that perhaps “some mechanics had tampered with the steering apparatus in an effort to 

keep her from gaining the recognition due to her.”
114

 It is uncertain whether Coleman’s plane 

was indeed sabotaged. The accident may well have resulted from the poor state of her airplane. 

As Bunn points out, unlike Earhart, who “flew top notch technologically advanced planes, 

Coleman was forced by her meager financial means to fly second rate, broken down, and falling- 

apart aircraft...”
115

  

Between the time of Coleman’s accident in 1923 and May 1925, newspaper coverage of 

her aviation career dwindled significantly. Not only had the accident cost her possible sponsors, 

but Coleman had gained a reputation for being unreliable. The Baltimore African American, for 

                                                 
111

 Rich, Queen Bess Daredevil Aviator, 65, 69. 
112

 Chicago Defender, “Bessie Coleman Says Good Will Come From Hurt,” March 10, 1923.   
113

 Ibid.  
114

 Chicago Defender, “No Flight by Bessie Coleman; Rain Interferes,” September 8, 1923.  
115

 Edward DeV.Bunn, Jr., Lifting as  he   imbed. Bessie  o eman’s  ontrib tions to the E evation of B ack 

Women (Gainesville, Florida: Cambridge Lighthouse Press, 2005), 69.  



150 

 

example, wrote in May 1924 that “Bessie Coleman, the colored girl who has been presenting 

herself as an aviatrix for the past two seasons...has in that time accumulated a long list of 

incomplete contracts, and an almost as lengthy list of managers and agents...”
116

 Around the 

same time, an article in the Chicago Defender warned managers not to book Coleman because “a 

large number of complaints against Miss Coleman from reliable showmen and noted citizens” 

had been made.
117

  

It was not until May 1925 that Coleman finally succeeded in arranging a series of lectures 

and exhibition flights in her home state of Texas.
118

 P. DeWalt, owner of one of the most 

successful black playhouses in the South, Houston’s Lincoln Theater, supported the cause of 

‘lifting up’ African Americans through aviation, and agreed to manage Coleman’s shows.
119

 

Aside from Coleman’s stunts, the Texas shows also featured established white stunt flyer 

Captain R. W. Mackie, who probably provided Coleman with an airplane, and one of his troop 

members, parachute jumper Ulysses Stallings.
120

 Coleman’s initial shows in Houston proved so 

successful that she was invited to perform in Austin, San Antonio, Wharton and Waxahachie, 

Texas. In Waxahachie, the organizers initially arranged separate admission gates for black and 

white spectators, but Coleman opposed this plan and refused to perform unless the city provided 

a single entrance. Although her demand was accommodated, the fact that the audience was 

segregated again as soon as it had entered the venue must have infuriated Coleman.
121

 Asked to 

perform a parachute jump at the annual flower show of the Orlando Chamber of Commerce in 

                                                 
116

 Baltimore Afro-American, “Aviatrix Loses Another Manager,” May 2, 1924.  
117

 Chicago Defender, “Bessie Banned,” May 24, 1924. 
118

 Rich, Queen Bess Daredevil Aviator, 83, 85.  
119

 Snider, “Flying to Freedom,” 203-4.  
120

 Baltimore Afro-American, “Bessie Coleman flys in Houston,” July 11, 1925; Baltimore Afro-American, “Aviatrix 

Heads Another Meet,” July 18, 1925; The Chicago Defender, “Aviatrix Performs for Texas Crowds,” July 25, 1925; 

Rich, Queen Bess Daredevil Aviator, 86; Snider, “Flying to Freedom,” 206.  
121

 Rich, Queen Bess Daredevil Aviator, 89, 90, 93-95; Snider, “Flying to Freedom,” 209.  



151 

 

Florida for a white-only audience, she refused until the organizers, despite strictly enforced 

segregation laws in Florida, finally gave in and opened the event to both black and white 

spectators.
122

 

 

Image 6: Bessie Coleman on the wheel of a Curtiss JN-4 “Jennie” circa 1924. Courtesy of the 

National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution.  

 

The Sky is the Limit for Queen Bess 

In 1926, the Negro Welfare League in Jacksonville, Florida, asked Coleman to perform at 

their annual First of May Field Day. Honoured, Coleman accepted this invitation, hoping to be 

able to raise the necessary funds for the flying school she had dreamed of for some time. In 

Florida, she had trouble locating an airplane because dealers were reluctant to sell planes to 

                                                 
122

 Rich, Queen Bess Daredevil Aviator, 104, 105.  



152 

 

African Americans. Instead she contacted her (white) mechanic, William D. Wills, in Dallas, 

Texas, and asked him to fly a plane to Florida for her performance. The plane, again a Jenny, 

was not very well maintained, and Wills had to make two forced landings on his way to 

Jacksonville.
123

 Nevertheless, that was the plane Coleman could afford and the one she was to 

use for her show.
124

  

The day before the exhibition, Wills test-piloted the plane with Coleman as his passenger. 

When the plane unexpectedly went into a nosedive, Coleman, who was peering over the edge of 

the cockpit without her seatbelt attached, was catapulted out of the plane and fell to her death. 

Wills, still in the plane thanks to his seatbelt, righted the aircraft but then hit the top of a tree and 

plunged to the ground. It was reported that John T. Betsch, Coleman’s Florida publicity manager 

and a member of the Jacksonville Negro Welfare League, rushed to the plane and, to calm his 

nerves, struck a match to light a cigarette, thereby igniting the gasoline fumes surrounding the 

plane. Wills died inside the burning aircraft.
125

  

 Inevitably, Coleman’s death spurred a number of speculations. According to Freydberg, 

some African Americans believed that Wills or “white people” had sabotaged Coleman’s plane. 

It seemed to make sense, given that Wills had succeeded in regaining control over the plane after 

Coleman fell out.
126

 The Chicago Defender, however, silenced most suspicions by reporting that 

the “expert aviators” who had examined the wreckage believed that a wrench had slid between 

the control gears and jammed them, causing the accident. According to the experts, the plane 

                                                 
123

 Chicago Defender, “Bessie Coleman, Aviatrix, Killed,” May 8, 1926; Rich, Queen Bess Daredevil Aviator, 108-

109.  
124

 Freydberg, Bessie Coleman, 94; Rich, Queen Bess Daredevil Aviator, 108-9.  
125

 Evening Independent, “Woman Falls 2,000 Feet in Air Smash,” April 30, 1926; Lewiston Daily, “Only Negro 

Woman Aviator is Killed in Practice Flight,” May 1, 1926; Freydberg, Bessie Coleman, 95; Rich, Queen Bess 

Daredevil Aviator, 110.  
126

 Freydberg, Bessie Coleman, 95-6; Rich, Queen Bess Daredevil Aviator, 117.  



153 

 

was an “old-fashioned army type,” and they concluded that the accident would not have 

happened in a modern plane with protected gears.
127

 Coleman’s death was mourned by many, 

and both black and white admirers attended her three memorial services. The first was held on 

May 2, 1926, in Jacksonville, Florida, followed shortly by a service in Orlando, Florida, and a 

last one in Chicago. Coleman was buried in the Lincoln Cemetery on Blue Island, Illinois, where 

several famous African Americans such as Robert Abbott (1870-1940), blues musician Big Bill 

Broonzy (1898-1958) and jazz pianist and singer Lil Harding Armstrong (1898-1971) would 

later be laid to rest.  

 Although Coleman’s career was short, her tragic death made her an inspiring symbol – 

even a martyr, some would argue – of African American pursuits in the field of aviation. In the 

first decades after her death, the Chicago Defender’s readers were frequently reminded of 

Coleman’s courageous exploits and encouraged to follow her example. Although Coleman had 

begun to pave the way for the acceptance of African Americans in aviation, those who tried to 

gain a foothold were still discouraged because of the discrimination they faced from the white 

aviation industry. “Disaster seems to attend all our efforts in this field,” a reporter in the Chicago 

Defender noted:  

...partly because of a lack of interest on our part, and partly because of 

insufficient preparation on the part of those who are trying. We are barred from 

schools of aviation; the government shuts the doors in our faces, and lack of 

funds makes it impossible for us to procure first class equipment for our efforts 

in aviation.
128

  

 

 It soon became clear that Coleman’s accomplishments were exceptional and not 

something many black Americans at the time would be able to repeat. The rallying notion of 

                                                 
127

 Chicago Defender, “Bessie Coleman, Aviatrix, Killed,” May 8, 1926.  
128

 Chicago Defender, “Bessie Coleman,” May 14, 1927.   



154 

 

‘racial uplift’ as promoted by Coleman, “illustrates the problematic aspect of identifying a 

standpoint that encompasses all black women,” or all black Americans, Higginbotham explained.  

Also, the notions that black Americans had to catch up with the white and learn how to fly to 

enter white, ‘mainstream’ society equated normality with conformity to white middle-class 

standards and values. Racial uplift certainly stood in sharp contrast “with daily practices and 

aesthetic tastes of many poor, uneducated, and “unassimilated” black men and women dispersed 

throughout the rural South or newly huddled in urban centres.”
129

  

William Powell (1897-1942) was among the first African Americans to earn a pilot 

license following Coleman’s death. After being turned away from flight schools in Chicago, he 

earned his permit at Warren College of Aeronautics in Los Angeles in 1928. Powell went on to 

establish a Bessie Coleman Aero Club and the first aviation school for African Americans.
130

 

The first African American woman to follow in Coleman’s footsteps was Willa Brown (1906-

1992), who earned her pilot license in 1937 and would, in later years, become greatly involved in 

the advancement of aviation for African Americans.
131

 Brown was able to set up a flying school 

in Chicago, but as flight training remained a segregated activity, the school’s flying field had to 

be created outside the city limits. In the military, African Americans continued to face 

discrimination and prejudice; they were barred from flight training in the United States until 

World War II, when the first black air corps, the Tuskegee Airmen, was established, with 

Coleman as their inspirational muse.
132

 Today, the Bessie Coleman Foundation in Washington, 

                                                 
129

 Higginbotham, “African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race,” 271. The double quotation 

marks around unassimilated are the author’s.  
130

 Bix, “Bessie Coleman Race and Gender Realities Behind Aviation Dreams,”16.  
131

 See Fredyberg, “Willa Brown (1906-1992), Aviator, Activist, Educator,” in Notable Black American Women, ed.: 

Jessie Carney Smith and Shirelle Phelps (Book II, Detroit, Michigan: Gale Research Inc., 1996).  
132

 Bix, “Bessie Coleman Race and Gender Realities Behind Aviation Dreams,”16.  

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_2?_encoding=UTF8&sort=relevancerank&search-alias=books&field-author=Shirelle%20Phelps


155 

 

D.C., encourages African American women to take up flying and provides a strong base of 

support for female African American aviators.
133

   

 

Conclusion  

 Race, gender and class struggles clearly permeated Bessie Coleman’s life and career path 

in aviation. What Vertinsky and Captain note in the context of black female athletes, that they 

“are racial and gendered and classed, with each and/or all of these categories taking on a 

different importance in certain moments and particular contexts,”
134

 is equally true about 

Coleman’s career as a black female aviator. The ways in which Coleman experienced the 

American ‘era of aviation’ differed significantly from those of white female aviators both in the 

ways they promoted themselves and in the manner in which they were promoted by media. 

Although the aviation industry opened up to increased female membership in the 1920s, most 

women who were able to join were either affluent or had middle-class backgrounds. None of 

these advantages applied to Coleman, though she nevertheless gained a pilot license and rivaled 

her white female counterparts in flying competence.  

 To gain credibility as a black aviator in a white industry and to simultaneously earn 

respect from the African American aviation community, Coleman had to navigate between what 

she considered to be her African American roots and the opportunities the white American and 

European aviation industry offered her. She made sure she organized her shows to appeal to both 

black and white audiences, and she only signed contracts with white managers if black people 

were also allowed to attend the show. Not surprisingly, Coleman frequently encountered 

                                                 
133

 See The Bessie Coleman Foundation website: http://www.wearethelegacy.com/ [Accessed April 3, 2010]. 

Currently the foundation seems the use its facebook instead of its website: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Bessie-

Coleman-Foundation/113677978696209 [accessed June 30, 2013]. 
134

 Vertinksy and Captain, “More Myth than History,” 535. Italics are original.  

http://www.wearethelegacy.com/
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Bessie-Coleman-Foundation/113677978696209
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Bessie-Coleman-Foundation/113677978696209


156 

 

difficulties in this navigation exercise and was strongly criticized, even by black newspapers, 

when she broke contracts with managers or did not follow up on the arrangements that had been 

made for her. Her unique position as a black woman successful in a white field of endeavour 

gave her the ability to see ‘both sides’ and to negotiate opportunities accordingly. This very 

position was, of course, also what made her career difficult and unstable at times.  

 Coleman’s excellent networking skills, her lighter skin colour, and attractive appearance 

gave her, at least to some degree, the social mobility most women of her background would not 

have been able to acquire. Born in poor circumstances, Coleman became a popular heroine and 

was able to secure the funds necessary to not only sustain her career as aviator, but also to 

support her desire to join the more affluent classes.
135

 Unlike Earhart, who was supported in 

most of her endeavours by her manager and husband George Palmer Putnam, Coleman was in 

many ways a ‘self-made woman.’ Supported by the desire of black newspapers – the Chicago 

Defender in particular – to increase their readership and revenues, her timely appearance after 

the racial violence in Tulsa helped her become a ‘missionary’ and an advocate of black progress 

in aviation. Moreover, her entrepreneurial skills and her ability to turn her aviation shows into a 

popular form of entertainment for all audiences made her longed-for career as an aviator 

possible. 

                                                 
135

 Illustrative is that in 1925 Coleman purchased a house at the Grand Boulevard in Chicago: “To give it real class,” 

the Baltimore Afro-American reported, “Miss Bessie Coleman, the bird woman, and Jack Johnson, the fighter, also  

purchased homes there [at the Grand Boulevard].” See Baltimore Afro-American, “Grand Boulevard Replaces State 

St,” February 7, 1925; New York Amsterdam News, “Grand Boulevard in Chicago Is a World Famous Stroll,” March 

4, 1925.  



157 

 

Chapter VI: Conclusion 

Let me return, in concluding, to my view that any society that hopes to be 

imperishable must carve out for itself a piece of space and a period of time in 

which it can look honestly at itself. The honesty is not that of the scientist, who 

exchanges honesty of his ego for the objectivity of his gaze. It is, rather, akin to 

the supreme honesty of the creative artist who, in his presentations of the stage, in 

the book, on canvas, in marble, in music, or in towers and houses, reserves to 

himself the privilege of seeing straight what all cultures build crooked. 

 

Victor Turner, “Liminality and the Performative Genre,” 1984, 40.
1
 

 

 In this work, I have tried to reflect Turner’s message that performance, and aerial 

performances of modernity in particular, provide useful windows into a society’s cultural values 

and beliefs, especially where conceptions of gender, race, class, and sexuality are concerned. I 

have then argued that aerial performers like Charmion, Barbette, and Bessie Coleman were 

instrumental in questioning and reshaping traditional beliefs regarding the gendered, racialized, 

classed, and sexualized body-in-motion between 1880 and 1930. Indeed, while the entertainment 

offered in circuses, vaudeville theatres, and local fairs was often associated with what Bakhtin 

would call “unofficial culture,” the marginal, or the low,
2
 spectacular and provocative 

performances by aerialists like Charmion, Coleman, and Barbette simultaneously reflected and 

challenged anxieties about the physical abilities and appearance of the female and the male body.  

What made aerial bodies stand out from the large group of performers between 1880 and 

1930 was their combination of risk, gender ambiguity/transgression, and spectacular aerial action 

that seemingly lifted categories of identity, at least temporarily. Indeed, as Tait and Stoddart 

have noted repeatedly, bodies that flew in the fantastic spaces of theater, circus, and open-air 

                                                 
1
 Victor Turner, “Liminality and the Performative Genre,’ in Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle/ Rehearsals Toward a 

Theory of Cultural Performance, ed. John J. MacAloon (Institute for the Study of Human Issues, Inc: Philadelphia, 

Pennsylvania, 1984), 40.  
2
 Peter Stallybrass, and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 

1986), 22-23.  



158 

 

fairs rendered categories of race, gender, and sexuality ambiguous. Many female trapeze flyers 

were as muscular as their male counterparts and executed the same aerial routines, blurring or 

shifting the boundaries between traditional notions of masculinity and femininity. Specifically, 

trapeze acrobats like Charmion combined feminine sexuality with male muscularity, stimulating 

questions about the female body’s ‘appropriate’ physical appearance and capabilities. Similarly, 

aviators like Coleman wore male flying attire, and their leather flying caps and goggles made it 

difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish their gendered and racial identities. Likewise, the 

distance between high-flying aerialists and audiences below added to the difficulty in 

distinguishing gender and race, while adding to the spectacular nature of their performances, 

which seemed to defy laws of gravity. 

 The carnivalesque or liminal spaces of entertainment venues offered possibilities to 

aerialists for stretching the boundaries of what was deemed possible in terms of the physical 

capabilities of the human body. However, aerialists also met with resistance because their 

performances and bodies simultaneously evoked admiration, desire, and repulsion from 

spectators, managers, and show critics. On the one hand, performers like Charmion and Coleman 

were praised as ambitious and ‘perfect’ examples of what women their age should strive for; on 

the other hand, their ambition and proficiency in their fields of endeavour were also viewed as 

threatening signs of unruliness, transgression, and even the grotesque. Indeed, referring back to 

Russo, female acrobats and stunt fliers in modernity could be understood as models of female 

exceptionalism, but also as the “double, dwarfed, distorted (stunted) creatures of the sideshow 



159 

 

which stand in as the representatives of a well-known cultural representation of the female body 

as monstrous and lacking …”
3
  

 Associations with the grotesque were not tied solely to the aerialist’s status of 

exceptionality, but also to the ways in which the aerial body articulated gender, or the lack 

thereof. This became particularly apparent in my chapter about Barbette, who complicated 

gender categories through his combination of female impersonation and aerial action. Moreover, 

literary critics at his time linked his aerial body with androgyny, supporting the notion that the 

gender of the aerial body becomes ambiguous while in flight. Man Ray’s images of Barbette in 

the process of gender transformation, as well as Cocteau’s 1926 essay, certainly emphasized the 

artist’s gender-ambiguous and grotesque body.   

 One can see, however, as I point out in my discussion about the grotesque body and 

agency in Chapter II, how the grotesque can be interpreted in different ways. According to 

Bakhtin, the grotesque was entirely positive, and suggested possibilities outside of the ‘rigid’ 

structure of everyday life. The grotesque body with all its “protuberances and offshoots”
4
 was a 

body in the process of becoming, a body that fostered possibilities. In other words, the marginal 

body -like the aerial body- was capable of resisting authoritative discourses in the 

liminal/carnivalesque spaces in which it operated, unlike the “finished” bourgeois body.
5
  

 In my case studies I have shown that aerial performers operating in liminal spaces 

fostered possibilities in terms of human/women’s agency. Charmion’s performances encouraged 

the agency of women through bodily reform, including building muscles, following a healthy 

diet, and exercising on a regular basis. She also suggested the rejection of corsets and other 

                                                 
3
 Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque. Risk, Excess and Modernity (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 23.   

4
 Mikail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 

1984 (1968)), 29.  
5
 Ibid, 28, 29; Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 22. 



160 

 

clothing that would hamper a woman’s free movement, especially when engaging in exercise. 

Barbette, on the other hand, suggested different gender possibilities and showed the illusion of 

the existence of a gender binary. Coleman’s performances also suggested new possibilities: in a 

climate of strict racial segregation, she was able to request that both black and white performers 

attended her shows and that they entered through the same admission gate. In addition, she 

combined elements from both white and black culture in her flying shows, suggesting a bridging 

of racial barriers and possibly encouraging interaction between black and white spectators.  

 As we have seen, aerialists’ agency was limited and confined by the bounds of a 

patriarchal entertainment industry and, more broadly, by cultural prescriptions regarding the 

female and male body. Through the examples of Barbette, Coleman, and Charmion, I have 

shown various ways in which aerialists negotiated these tensions. Of particular importance in 

this navigation, especially in the cases of Charmion and Barbette, was the developing ‘visual 

culture’ around the turn of the twentieth century. Visual technologies had a strong impact on 

performers’ agency because their cinematographic and photographic representations could take 

on different meaning outside of the context of their performances. Barbette’s provocative 

portraits taken by Man Ray, for example, contributed to a larger debate about the instability of 

gender and functioned as a critique of France’s crisis of masculinity in the interwar years. 

Whether or not Barbette’s effect on French gender politics at the time was deliberate is not clear. 

Charmion most likely benefitted from her role in Edison’s Trapeze Disrobing Act, though the 

short film only showed her undressing act and not her muscular display. In other words, the film 

was simply meant to titillate (mostly male) audiences, and not so much to show Charmion’s 

physical abilities, therefore bringing into question how much this specific work contributed to 

discussions around cultural prescriptions of the female body.   



161 

 

   Aerial performers, like those in my study, had to “embrace a condition of complete 

spectacularization.”
 6 

For example, not only were trapeze performers’ bodies in tight costumes 

visible from all angles to their audiences, aerialists images were also visible on (theater) 

billboards, postcards, magazines, and commercial merchandise. Moreover, their names and acts 

were described and spectacularized in the amusement sections of newspapers and magazines. 

The talent of the female performer then, as Brown notes, 

was her agile ability to navigate between and manipulate discursive terrains. 

Engaged in multiple directional strategies of perception … the … female flâneur 

occupied a privileged vantage point from which to view the world. As she is 

gazed upon, she also gazes back, and it is her body that questions.
7
 

 

The view of the female performer as flâneur or flâneuse, as I have also pointed out in my 

introduction, echoes the idea of a free, autonomous and independent body. The aerial bodies I 

have addressed in my work especially evoked a sense of freedom that was unparalleled by most 

other performing bodies at the time. In the case of trapeze artists for example, Tait notes that 

“[f]lying out from the trapeze and falling through space demonstrated a spectacle of unrestricted 

if unattainable physical freedom. Mastery over the aerial trick created a realm of performative 

freedoms which somersaulted meanings attached to physical bodies into fantasy.”
8
 

The seemingly unlimited freedom aerialists embodied certainly reflected modern beliefs 

in technological progress and the infinite capacities of the (male) body. According to Rabinbach, 

scientists at the turn of the twentieth century believed that “[t]he human body and the industrial 

machine were both motors that converged energy into mechanical work. The automata no longer 

                                                 
6
 Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Durham, NC: Duke 

University Press, 2008), 17. It needs to be noted that Brown makes this claim for Black women in particular, but I 

think this could also be said about white performers, especially white female performers around the turn of the 

twentieth century.  
7
 Ibid.  

8
 Peta Tait, “Feminine Free Fall: A Fantasy of Freedom,” Theatre Journal 48 (1) (1996): 33.  



162 

 

had to be denied a soul – all of nature exhibited the same protean qualities as the machine.”
9
 The 

fascination with ‘the body as machine,’ and the mechanisms of its movements contributed to the 

development of cinematography, which, as we have seen, helped popularize and spread (moving) 

images of so-called ‘perfect bodies’ like Charmion and Eugen Sandow. These performers, in 

their claims about the benefits of physical culture in pursuit of healthy life-styles, encouraged the 

belief that ‘every body’ could be molded and shaped like theirs as long as a strict regime of 

dieting and training was followed. This fascination with muscularity, as Budd has noted, was at 

the same time a reaction against the widespread industrialization or ‘machine age’ in which the 

human body seemed to have lost its significance and agency.
10

  

While muscular women like Charmion and Katie Sandwina were considered ‘New’ or 

‘Modern,’ also other types of femininities (as well as masculinities) became popular and were 

emblematic of shifting perceptions about the gendered as well as racialized body. Indeed, 

modernity came to mean muscles, but also slenderness. Barbette, along with other popular 

performers like the tall and slim dancer, Ida Rubinstein, for example,
11

 were often associated 

with a sexually provocative androgyny, seemingly freed from markers of gender. In a similar 

vein, the 1920s’ female flapper who blended typical feminine and masculine categories by 

bobbing her hair, smoking cigars and wearing short skirts, broke with conventional norms that 

stipulated appropriate behaviour for women.   

                                                 
9
 Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor. Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley, Los Angeles: 

University of California Press, 1990), 2.  
10

 Michael Anton Budd, The Sculpture Machine. Physical Culture and Body Politics in the Age of Empire 

(Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Press LTD, 1997), 75. 
11

 See Patricia Vertinsky, “Ida Rubinstein: Dancing Decadence and the ‘Art of the Beautiful Pose,’ ” Nashim: A 

Journal of Jewish Women's Studies & Gender Issues (forthcoming).  



163 

 

The “flying flapper,” as Walker labels female aviation pioneers of the 1920s,
12

 also 

represented an adventurous and independent New Woman. Aviators like Bessie Coleman and 

Amelia Earhart for example, clearly “cross[ed] back and forth over traditional gender boundaries 

with both [their] actions and [their] dress.”
13

 Earhart’s bobbed hair, her slender stature in 

combination with leather flying cap, goggles, jacket and breeches rendered her female identity 

ambiguous. When she did not fly, however, she emphasized her femininity by wearing pearls, 

skirts and dresses. “Neither tomboy nor butch, neither masculinized nor sexualized,” Herrmann 

notes, Earhart represented yet another type of feminine identity in the 1920s.
14

  

Similar arguments can be made for Coleman; she dressed in a rather masculine way 

during her flying shows, though seemed to have capitalized on her beautiful, feminine 

appearance when she was not flying. Not only did she cross traditional gender boundaries, but 

also racial ones by taking up aviation and by networking with white men in this pursuit. 

Moreover, the airplane, often associated with unlimited progress and simultaneously perceived 

as a tool for mass destruction, fuelled both optimism and fears among black individuals in the 

1920s. Coleman felt she had to encourage Black Americans to take part in the burgeoning field 

of aviation in order to alleviate fears of oppression and keep up with technological 

developments. It was believed that the airplane, quite literally, could contribute to racial ‘uplift.’  

At the heart of modernity, as I have shown in this study, was the body in motion as well 

shifting definitions of ‘mobility’ more generally. In many respects, technologies like 

cinematography, trapeze acrobatics and airplane shows, changed the perceived dimensions of 

                                                 
12

 Mike Walker, Powder Puff Derby: Petticoat Pilots and Flying Flappers (Chichester: Wiley, 2003).  
13

 Susan Ware, Still Missing. Amelia Earhart and the Search for Modern Feminism (New York: 

W.W. Norton & Company, 1993), 167. 
14

 Anne Herrmann, “On Amelia Earhart” The Aviatrix as American Dandy,” Michigan Quarterly Review 39 (1) 

(2000): 104. 



164 

 

time and space, as well as distance and speed.
15

 Aerialists’ interactions with these technologies 

also helped change perceptions of the (physical) possibilities as well as limitations of the human 

body. On the one hand, aerialists symbolized progress and the infinite physical capacities of the 

body, while on the other hand, the frequent airplane and trapeze accidents, as well as career-

ending injuries were stark reminders of the human body’s physical limits. Likewise, while 

individuals like Charmion, Barbette and Coleman encouraged progressive ideas about gender, 

race, and sexuality through provocative and daring aerial action, they must be seen within the 

discourses and power dynamics of the respective frameworks/contexts in which they operated.  

While technologies such as trains, ships, automobiles and airplanes quite obviously 

contributed to many individuals’ mobility as travelers, in the case of the aerialists in my study, 

they also seem to have contributed to social mobility. Aviators like Coleman quite literally flew 

their way into spaces women had not occupied before and, in many respects, also paved the way 

for other women to follow similar paths or at least to be inspired. Performers like Charmion 

encouraged women to engage in physical activity, to venture out from their private homes into 

the public, and to wear clothes that would facilitate their free movement. Moreover, on an 

individual level, Charmion, Coleman and Barbette’s popularity gave them the necessary 

financial and social means to join the more affluent classes.  

Aerialists like Charmion, Coleman and Barbette certainly symbolized many of the hopes, 

fears and contradictions inherent to a society that was forced to revisit traditional ideas about 

gender, race, class, and sexuality. Their aerial performances signified beliefs about the unlimited 

physical capacities of the human body and societal progress more generally. They represented a 

                                                 
15

 See for example Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard 

University Press, 1983).  



165 

 

certain optimism about the future and a freedom seemingly unhindered by the weight of the 

body’s flesh. Clearly, these bodies were ‘modern’ bodies; autonomous, entrepreneurial and 

eccentric, yet part of an increasingly capitalist industry that framed the extent to which they 

could disrupt categories of gender, race and sexuality.  

 

Contributions  

Historians like Peta Tait and Helen Stoddart
16

 were among the first to address and 

analyze the aerial body while taking social inequalities pertaining to gender, class and sexuality 

into account. In my study, I have attempted to build upon their work in order to articulate my 

own. It was my goal to go beyond the existing literature by extending the notion of flying and 

explorations of race, gender, and sexuality to different, though overlapping contexts as well as to 

use theoretical notions borrowed from Bakhtin, Turner and feminist thinkers to guide my 

analyses. In my work I have started to dissect the notion of aerialism as it pertained to aviation 

and trapeze acrobatics between 1880 and 1930, and more specifically, as it related to the careers 

of Charmion, Barbette and Coleman. Throughout their three case studies I have not only 

addressed specific aspects of  trapeze flying and aviation in modernity, but also some of the 

diverse social (theater, circus, flying meets, the city) and geographical (North American and 

European) spaces in which aerial performances took place between 1880 and 1930. 

 My study can be viewed as contributing to the developing field of women’s aerial 

history in multiple and intersecting ways. First, my analyses of the careers of boundary-breaking 

                                                 
16

 See Peta Tait, Circus Bodies Cultural Identity in Aerial Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 2005); 

Helen Stoddart, Rings of Desire: Circus History and Representation (UK: Manchester University Press, 2000). See 

also Angela Dalle Vache, “Wings of Desire: Aviation, Fashion, Circus Stunts. History and Analysis,” In Diva 

Defiance and Passion in Early Italian Cinema (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008); Russo, The Female 

Grotesque.  

http://webcat2.library.ubc.ca/vwebv/search?searchArg=Tait,%20Peta,&searchCode=NAME&searchType=4
http://webcat2.library.ubc.ca/vwebv/search?searchArg=Circus%20bodies&searchCode=TALL&searchType=1


166 

 

pioneers Charmion, Barbette and Coleman can be considered rather ‘unique’ contributions in 

that they address three pioneering performers whose acts and careers have not received much 

attention from (feminist) historians in the past. Moreover, in my case studies I bring together 

traditional research methods by analysing understudied empirical or ‘primary source’ materials 

found in (digital) archives, and postmodern, feminist theoretical notions as borrowed and 

modified from Mikail Bakhtin, Victor Turner, Joan Scott, Judith Butler, Susan Leigh Foster, Peta 

Tait and others. While I have considered theoretical notions like the carnivalesque, the grotesque, 

liminality, intersectionality and so on, primarily as tools that guided my work and helped me 

produce in-depth understandings and analyses of the primary as well as secondary sources at 

hand, I see my work as providing fertile ground for further theorizations of the notion of 

aerialism in modernity in similar and different contexts.  

My work certainly opens up avenues for thinking about the meanings of flying and the 

technology of flying, both in modernity as well as today. Connections between flying and risk, 

for example, could be elaborated on as well as the meanings of aerialism in other cultural 

contexts, such as art, novels and poetry.
17

 In the next section I address some of the possible 

avenues for future research extending from my study.  

 

Future Research 

What makes historical research so rich and interesting is that is never finished and, much 

like the aerial performances in this study, it is always a ‘becoming.’ This is no different in my 

                                                 
17

 The changes in perception of speed, distance and mobility brought about by a combination of airplanes and film 

technology, for example, spurred the coming of age of the male dominated Italian aeropittura movement, which 

literally meant ‘aeropainting.’ In a similar vein the technology of flight also spurred the aeropoesia movement or 

‘aeropoetry,’ celebrating change, optimism, chaos and thus modernity itself. See Willard Bohn, “The Poetics of 

Flight: Futurist Aeropoesia,” MLN 121 (1) (2006): 207-24. The notion of aerialism can, of course, also be opened up 

to current-day contexts, like that of freestyle skiing or snowboarding for example.  



167 

 

work. Although I have identified and explored a large number of newspaper articles, 

photographs, and also used secondary sources for context, I have just only begun to uncover 

details about the careers of Barbette, Coleman, and Charmion. While I have conducted 

exhaustive searches for each individual, there certainly are numerous gaps remaining for further 

investigation. Little is known about where exactly both Barbette and Charmion travelled and 

how they were received in different places. Coleman’s story could be made more complete by a 

thorough investigation of her time in Europe. Not only would it be useful to know how she was 

received there, but also where exactly she went, which (flying) activities she engaged in, and 

who she met. Barbette’s story could be enriched by a more in-depth exploration of his life after 

his career as aerial performer. There also may be more to be found on Charmion’s work overseas 

in archives unknown to date. It is my hope that more insight into the activities and experiences of 

these performers abroad, as well as into their lives after their careers as aerial performers, may 

shed further light on their personalities, their motives for their engagements in aerial activities, as 

well as their personal aspirations.  

Charmion, Barbette, and Coleman are just three of many male and female aerialists who 

flooded the stages in North America and Europe between 1880 and 1930. One of the reasons that 

I was able to recover some of the ‘traces’ these performers left was because their acts were 

particularly novel and provocative and may have received more coverage in newspapers and 

other media than most other performances at the time. I therefore see my study as a foundation 

and opportunity for further investigations into ‘women who flew,’ and whose histories (or 

‘herstories’) have not received much attention from (feminist) scholars to date.  

 There are several avenues I consider worth pursuing. First, expanding the number of case 

studies, by either including more trapeze artists and aviators, and/or to include other individuals 



168 

 

whose performances had an aerial component, would provide a richer foundation for 

understanding the place of such aerial performances in social/cultural ideas of this time. First, a 

study of trapeze artist Lillian Leitzel (18921931), who was a headline performer with the 

Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus in the 1910s and ’20s and whose career ended 

in a tragic trapeze accident in 1931, may be particularly interesting. Like Charmion, she was 

rather ‘petite,’ though incredibly strong. Despite her popularity, physical competence, and 

marriage to controversial trapeze legend Alfredo Codona (who killed his second wife and 

committed suicide years after Leitzel’s death), few scholars seem to have taken her remarkable 

career to heart. The considerable number of sources (though descriptive and fragmentary) 

available on Leitzel, suggests there may be an interesting story to be told, especially with regard 

to the ways in which she negotiated gender and femininity as a pioneering trapeze flyer.  

Another aerialist whose career has been addressed rather fragmentarily in many primary 

and secondary sources is Hélène Dutrieu (18771961), Belgium’s first female aviator and all-

round athlete. Starting her career as a cyclist, participating in both races and bicycle stunts, she 

later became a motorcycle stunt rider, an automobile racer, and finally, in 1910, a pioneering 

aviator who beat her male counterparts in several air races. After her athletic career, it is believed 

she became a journalist and advocate of women in aviation, though very little is known about 

that particular episode in her life. I am not only interested in Dutrieu because of our shared 

nationality, but also because sources addressing her career are rather descriptive and have not 

been able to provide insight into her personality, her motives for participating in several male 

fields of endeavour, her possible struggles in this field, or her advocacy on behalf of female 

aviators. In cooperation with my Belgian colleagues at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringling_Brothers_and_Barnum_and_Bailey_Circus


169 

 

(Thomas Ameye and Pascal Delheye), I have already started to uncover her remarkable story,
18

 

while I have continued to gather information on Dutrieu throughout the course of my doctoral 

work.  

I also hope to be able to conduct more transnational research on female aerialists in order 

to move away from my current Euro-centric approach. For example, my colleague in the Asian 

Studies Department at UBC, doctoral student Jiyoung Suh, brought the remarkable story of 

Korean female aviator Park Kyung-won to my attention.
19

 Park Kyung-won (19011933), whose 

tragic life as aviator flying in the 1920s and ’30s under the Japanese flag has been captured in the 

movie Blue Swallow (2005), continues to spark debate and outrage in Korea today. Her story, 

alongside that of Bessie Coleman, may serve as an example of the struggles, racism, and politics 

faced by women who flew across national boundaries in the 1920s.
20

  

As indicated above, I hope to use my study as the groundwork for future examinations of 

women who engaged in aerial activities in the past. More specifically, I would like to explore the 

history of female ski-jumpers and/or swimmers and divers. The recent women’s ski-jumping 

controversy at the Vancouver 2010 winter Olympics certainly sparked renewed interest in the 

history of (women’s) skiing and ski-jumping, including the life of British Columbia’s Isabelle 

Coursier (19061980), who was one of a small number of female ski-jumpers in Canada in her 

                                                 
18

 See Ameye, Thomas Bieke Gils and Pascal Delheye, “Belgian Pioneers in Rally Racing and Aerial Sports during 

the Belle Époque,” The International Journal for the History of Sport 28 (2) (2011): 211-214. 
19

 Jiyoung Suh has already found and translated fragments from Korean sources and lines from Park Kyung-won’s 

diary, though we have not (yet) been able to trace her full diary. The heated debates that surrounded Kyung-won’s 

flying under the Japanese flag in the 1920s were refuelled after Blue Swallow was launched in 2005. According to 

Jiyoung suh, the young actress who played Park Kyung-won’s role died shortly after the movie’s release, possibly 

(partially) due to the stress and accusations she encountered for playing the lead role.  
20

 An interesting example of cross-national research in aviation is Patti Gully’s book Sisters of Heaven: China's 

Barnstorming Aviatrixes: Modernity, Feminism, and Popular Imagination in Asia and the West, in which she 

addresses the lives and careers of three female Chinese aviation pioneers in the 1930s and the gender struggles they 

encountered in a male field of endeavour. Patti Gully, Sisters of Heaven: China's Barnstorming Aviatrixes: 

Modernity, Feminism, and Popular Imagination in Asia and the West (San Francisco: Long River Press, 2008).  



170 

 

time. Vertinsky, Jette, and Hofmann addressed her career briefly in their work on female ski-

jumpers in the Vancouver Olympics, though a more detailed analysis of Coursier’s life and 

career could generate a more profound understanding of the difficulties she and other female ski-

jumpers at the time encountered in their desire to ‘ski-fly.’
21

 

Female divers and swimmers, who were popular entertainers on vaudeville stages in the 

1910s and ’20s, showing off their bodies in tight bathing costumes and engaging in spectacular 

diving and/or mermaid acts, could, in many respects, also be viewed as flyers. While the flying 

metaphor quite obviously applies to divers, for female swimmers, an aerial notion may be 

gleaned from Cixous, Cohen, and Cohen, who in their heavily cited essay “The Laugh of the 

Medusa,” wrote that “[w]oman is an airborne swimmer, in flight, she does not cling to herself; 

she is dispersible, prodigious, stunning, desirous and capable of others, of the other woman that 

she will be, of the other woman she isn’t, of him, of you.”
22

 The idea that swimming is like 

flying, in that it also reflects a sense of freedom and possibilities for women’s agency, may be 

used productively in studying careers of divers and swimmers, such as, for example, vaudeville 

performer Annette Kellerman (18861975).  

While the individuals addressed in this study, and those I hope to address in the future, 

are individuals of the past, their legacies, both directly and indirectly, affect women’s as well as 

men’s agency today and continue to spark much interest. In Barbette’s case, for example, a direct 

connection between past and present can be found in John’s Kelly’s staging of Light Shall Lift 

Them (ca.1993), in which Kelly dances and shows Barbette’s story as a movie on a big screen 

                                                 
21

 See Patricia Vertinsky, Shannon Jette and Annette Hofman, “ ‘Skierinas’ in the Olympics. Gender Justice and 

Gender Politics at the Local, National and International Level over the Challenge of Women’s Ski Jumping,” 

Olympika XVIII (2009): 25-56.  
22

 Hélène Cixous, Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Signs 1 (4) (1976): 898.  



171 

 

behind him.
23

 Holden reports in the New York Times that Light Shall Lift Them is a theatrical 

homage to Barbette and “tells his story as a series of dreamlike tableaux vivants, which blend 

music, dance and film as they follow Clyde from childhood to a grand, crusty old age.”
24

 

A rather recent renewal of interest in the remarkably courageous, accomplished, and 

adventure-seeking female aviators of the 1920s and ’30s is also apparent. Feminist novelists 

Helen Humpreys and Kerry Greenwood, for example, tell stories about ‘flying flappers’ who 

outcompeted their male counterparts in record setting attempts and/or stunt flying. Greenwood’s 

book Flying Too High tells the story of private detective Phryne Fisher, a ‘modern’ woman, thin 

with bobbed hair, who drives a fast car, wears the latest fashion, has multiple lovers, and excels 

in stunt flying. Fisher is a stereotypical flapper who outsmarts her male colleagues in solving 

crimes.
25

 Humphrey’s novel Leaving Earth (1998) tells the story of two young women, the 

famous aviator Grace O’Gorman and the inexperienced Willa Briggs, who attempt to break the 

world flight-endurance record by circling above Toronto for twenty-five days. In their 

endeavour, they face fatigue, inclement weather, mechanical problems, and so on. Despite these 

hardships, however, flying provided them a way to temporarily transcend restrictions imposed on 

them in everyday life.
26

 O’ Gorman’s personality is certainly reminiscent of Amelia Earhart’s, 

whose life and aviation career has recently been documented in the biographical movie Amelia 

(2009).  

 The popularity of circuses like Cirque du Soleil, in which trapeze flyers and other 

aerialists frequently take center stage, also indicates a continued interest and fascination with 

                                                 
23

 See for example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAnNhju6MGw [accessed June 28, 2013].  
24

 Stephen Holden, “Review/Performance Art; John Kelly as a Parisian Legend,” New York Times, Nov. 12, 1993, 

http://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/12/theater/review-performance-art-john-kelly-as-a-parisian-legend.html [accessed 

June 28, 2013]. 
25

 Kerry Greenwood, Flying Too High. A Phryne Fisher Mystery (Scottsdale, AZ: Poisoned Penn Press, 1990).  
26

 Helen Humphreys, Leaving Earth (London: Bloomsburry, 1998).  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAnNhju6MGw
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/12/theater/review-performance-art-john-kelly-as-a-parisian-legend.html


172 

 

aerial bodies. In addition, “after decades of decline,” Duncan Wall explains, “the circus is 

booming around the world. From Norway to Nepal, new circus companies and schools are 

springing to life at a rate unprecedented in the modern circus’s nearly 250-year history.” Indeed, 

in France alone there are currently more than 450 troupes and 600 schools, and about twenty 

countries, including Belgium, Australia, and Mexico have established professional circus 

training grounds.
27

 The popularity of such routines has also extended beyond the space of the 

professional circus tent. Circus skills are now often promoted as forms of ‘fun’ recreation and 

ways to build the body. The Vancouver circus school in Richmond, for example, advertises 

trapeze, aerial silk, and other acrobatic skills classes for all ages starting from pre-school. There 

are even specific fitness classes “strategically designed to include circus activities as a 

fundamental for core stability, overall flexibility, …”
28

 

 The current-day popularity of (queer) aerial performances similar to Barbette’s, the 

histories of female aviation heroines of the 1920s, together with the renewed interest in 

(professional and recreational) circus performances, is certainly encouraging of research areas 

extending from this thesis in which aerial performances and aerial bodies are central. The same 

questions I have asked here, regarding aerialists of the past, may also be asked in the context of 

today’s seeming resurgence (or continuation) of interest in aerial activities: What may aerial 

bodies and activities tell us about current-day perceptions of the (fe)male body and the culture in 

which it figures? How may they inform us about current-day notions of gender, race, and 

sexuality, and how may this be different or similar to notions regarding such topics in the past? 

                                                 
27

 Duncan Wall, “Moving Beyond the Big Tent,” New York Times March 16, 2013. 

<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/opinion/sunday/moving-beyond-the-big-tent.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0> 

[accessed May 8, 2013].   
28

 Vancouver Circus School, Fitness Programs, http://www.vancouvercircusschool.ca/classes/fitness-programs.php 

[accessed May 8, 2013].  

http://www.vancouvercircusschool.ca/classes/fitness-programs.php


173 

 

Also, how do female trapeze artists and aviators today negotiate cultural prescriptions regarding 

the body and its abilities, and how are their experiences different or similar from aerialists of the 

past?  

 While I will leave the answers to these questions ‘up in the air,’ at least for now, what is 

certain is that aerial performances of the past and present have the capacity to encourage 

reflection about taken-for-granted notions regarding the gendered/racialized/classed/sexualized 

body and inform us about the (in)stability of such notions. My study has raised more questions 

than it has answered, indicating much research remains to be undertaken in the rich arena of 

women’s aerial history. I hope that my study will stimulate reflection upon the pioneering work 

of women who flew between 1880 and 1930, as well as those who fly today. Moreover, it is my 

hope that my work provides a thought-provoking window onto the history of aerial performance 

and will inspire at least some individuals with a renewed sense of bodily agency.
29

 After all, 

“[women] who fly escape the dangers of domination, the tyrannical powers of orthodoxy. Flight 

is also a positive course, a soaring; it traces the path of desire.”
30

                                                 
29

 Susan Leigh Foster, Choreographing History. Bloomington (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1995), 12.  
30

 Joan Wallach Scott, “Feminism’s History,” Jo rna  of Women’s Histor , 16 (2) (2004): 26.  



174 

 

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