Flying Free? Risk and Regulation in Recreational Flying Trapeze

Abstract

ABSTRACT Legal and regulatory theory has been fascinated by the relationship between law and other forms of regulation in a differentiated society. While some scholars have pointed out the benefits of local regulation, especially when managing the risks of modern society, others have seen regulation in Foucauldian terms as discipline, the dark underside of liberal society. Law, in a Foucauldian approach, is usually understood as another form of constraint. There have, however, been recent suggestions that an enabling law could contain possibilities for openness and agency – much like Foucault’s concept of ‘technologies of the self’. At the same time, sociologists have used the technologies of the self to describe voluntary risk-taking, or ‘edgework’, as a form of escape from the disciplinary society. In this article, I examine these possibilities by investigating the operation of law and regulatory techniques in flying trapeze. Recreational flying trapeze is the kind of risky activity that was facilitated by the enabling law of the 2002 tort reforms. Recreational flyers, who are usually women, appear to experience a moment of freedom. Yet flyers are subject to local regulations and their own practice of self-regulation. As such, this activity provides a practical opportunity for examining the intersection of law, regulation, and the technologies of the self, and considering what they mean for the possibilities and limitations of freedom.