ABSTRACT
My biographical research on Loretta La Pearl, the first woman clown in America, is a case study of responding to the incomplete and biased nature of archives for women. Through my lens as a creative practitioner, I use the methodology of speculative biography as a means of countering the official archival gaps in Loretta’s story by re-deploying self-made archives of other circus women. I discuss the challenges of fragmentary records, speculation, authorial sympathy and intersectionality. In drawing on these creative methodologies, I am countering the incompleteness of circus archives and making visible the otherwise largely erased life of the first woman clown.
