Aerial, apparatus, assemblage: Pain, pleasure, kink, and the circus body without organs
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Addressing intersections of performances, practices, and practitioners of circus aerial and BDSM, I investigate how “play” manifests in both activities. Circus aerial and kink both involve forms of play that experiment with what is possible, tenable, and worthwhile for bodies to do under restrictive and painful conditions. Both practices are both pleasurable and serious, seeking transcendent, less “controlled” experiences, while maintaining the level of control necessary in forms of play involving real risk. Aerialists select their performance apparatuses not just aesthetically, but for the planes of intensity that playing on and with them enables them to traverse in experimentation and performance, mirroring the complex factors determining an individual’s preferred forms of kink play. Combining performance analysis, interviews with kink-involved circus aerial performers, and my own experience as an aerialist and a kink practitioner, in conversation with theories of play and of sexuality, I explore how intersections of pain, pleasure, and play in BDSM and aerial practice inform each other on embodied and aesthetic registers. I argue that, as an assemblage of aerialist and apparatus, the performer engages in a Deleuzian act of becoming, evoking a Body without Organs that, in its play of intensities, is more than incidentally masochistic.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it