La Circassienne: A Study of the Female Circus Artist in French Literature
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study examines how the female circus artist is represented in twelve pieces of French literature ranging from the late nineteenth century to the modern day. The books are divided into three categories by author type: first, authors without a circus background; second, male authors involved in the circus world; and third, women involved in the circus world. Although predicted that the first section would reveal the largest use of stereotypes and misogyny, the second would show the sexist expectations of the <em>circassienne</em> onstage and off, and the third would call out these stereotypes and suggest improvements, there was less variety found than expected. Only two authors—one from each of the first two categories—used <em>circassienne</em> stereotypes in an extremely negative manner, authors who were unfamiliar with circus but did research as well as the majority of the male authors familiar with circus bluntly stated some of the bias but did not offer solutions, and the majority of the female circus artist authors also stated the bias they faced but were limited in their opportunities to challenge stereotypes. Eleven of the books focus on artists from traditional circus, and only <em>Circassienne</em> looks at contemporary circus. Whereas there is a variety of literature about the contemporary circus scene in Quebec, <em>Circassienne</em> was the only book found to be written by a French <em>circassienne</em> that deals with normalizing the life of a circus artist in who lives in a house, sends their children to school, and creates pieces designed to expose children to contemporary circus as well as pieces with calls for activism. Overall, it was found that the situation for the female circus artist in traditional circus in France has not greatly changed in the past century. She is still expected to be feminine, to wear revealing costumes, and to flirt with the audience, often serving as the “female element” in an otherwise male-dominated group of performers. Reducing sexism in circus and the fight for gender equality remain part of the agenda of circus going forward, and progress is being seen faster in contemporary circus than in its traditional counterpart.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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