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Feminist City. Leslie Kern
Читать онлайн.Название Feminist City
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781788739832
Автор произведения Leslie Kern
Издательство Ingram
As a woman, a complete sense of anonymity or invisibility in the city had never fully existed for me. The constant anticipation of harassment meant that any ability to glide along as one of the crowd was always fleeting. Nonetheless, privileges such as white skin and able-bodiedness gave me some measure of invisibility. Blending seamlessly into the urban crowd, freely traversing the streets, and engaging in detached but appreciative spectatorship have been held up as true urban ideals since the explosive growth of industrial cities. The figure of the flâneur, emerging prominently in Charles Baudelaire’s writing, is a gentleman who is a “passionate spectator” of the city, seeking to “become one flesh with the crowd,” at the centre of the action and yet invisible.31 The philosopher and writer of urban life Walter Benjamin further crystallized the flâneur as an essential urban character in the modern city, and urban sociologists such as Georg Simmel located traits like a “blasé attitude” and the ability to be anonymous as inherent to the new urban psychology.32 Not surprisingly, given the perspectives of these writers, the flâneur was always imagined as a man, not to mention one who is white and able-bodied.
Could the flâneur be female? Feminist urban writers have been divided here. Some see the model of the flâneur as an exclusionary trope to critique; others, as a figure to be reclaimed. For those who reject the idea, women can never fully escape into invisibility because their gender marks them as objects of the male gaze.33 Others say the female flâneur has always existed. Calling her the flâneuse, these writers point to examples like Virginia Woolf. In Woolf’s 1930 essay “Street Haunting: A London Adventure,” the narrator imagines glimpses into strangers’ minds as she walks the streets of London, musing that “to escape is the greatest of pleasures; street haunting in winter the greatest of adventures.”34 In her own diary, Woolf wrote “to walk alone in London is the greatest rest,” implying that she found a measure of peace and detachment among the surging crowds.35 Geographer Sally Munt proposed the idea of the lesbian flâneur as an urban character who sidesteps the usual pathway of the heterosexual gaze and finds pleasure in observing other women.36
Lauren Elkin attempts to recover the invisible history of the flâneuse in her book Flâneuse: Women Walk the City. Elkin argues that women have been simultaneously hyper-visible and invisible in the streets. Always watched, yet written out of accounts of urban life. She describes her own youthful experiences of flânerie on the streets of Paris, long before she knew it had a name: “I could walk for hours in Paris and never ‘get’ anywhere, looking at the way the city was put together, glimpsing its unofficial history here and there…. I was on the lookout for residue, for texture, for accidents and encounters and unexpected openings.”37 Elkin insists the reluctance of men like Baudelaire, Benjamin, and Simmel to imagine a female flâneur comes from their inability to notice women acting in ways that didn’t fit their preconceived notions. Women walking in public were more likely to be read as streetwalkers (sex workers) than as women out for another purpose. But Elkin writes, “If we tunnel back, we find there always was a flâneuse passing Baudelaire in the street.”38
I have to wonder though, is the flâneuse ever pregnant or pushing a stroller? Artist and scholar Katerie Gladdys’ video “Stroller Flâneur” plays on the word stroller (a synonym for flâneur) as it depicts her pushing a baby stroller through her Gainesville, Florida neighbourhood. As the mommy flâneuse, she searches for “patterns and narratives in the genealogies of architectural structures and topographies while simultaneously searching for items of interest for [her] son.” Gladdys claims that “the performance of strolling a child is indeed one of the social processes of inhabiting and appropriating the public spaces” of the city. While I agree, and I would argue that moms pushing strollers are invisible in their own way, they’re not usually associated with the classic figure of the flâneur.39 And even the reclaimed flâneuse still inhabits a “normal” body, one able to move in unremarkable ways through the streets. None of the writers who talk about flâneuserie give mention to the pregnant body. While not all those who experience pregnancy are women (e.g. trans men), it’s certainly a state rife with gendered assumptions. If it was already a stretch to imagine the female version of the flâneur, then the idea of a pregnant flâneur is likely beyond the pale.
It’s impossible to blend in when your body has suddenly become public property. Although women often experience comments on our bodies and uninvited physical contact, pregnancy and motherhood elevate these intrusions to a new level. People read my protruding belly as if it said, “rub here please!” I was expected to cheerfully welcome all manner of unsolicited advice and to express appropriate amounts of shame and remorse for any lapse in following the reams of often contradictory “expert” tips on eating, drinking, vitamins, exercise, work, etc. I was no longer an individual making my own choices. It was like they’d been crowdsourced without my consent.
All of this made me extraordinarily aware of my body, and not in a good way. If the urbanite’s blasé attitude toward others is what allows each of us to maintain some sense of privacy in the crowd, its loss made me feel very public. I was embarrassed by my belly’s showy-ness, tackily thrusting my intimate biology into the civilized public sphere. I didn’t want to glow. I wanted to hide. I wasn’t trying to disguise my pregnancy, but I was overcome with an urge to modesty that no amount of feminist body positivity could shake. My friends loved to tease me about the number of crop tops in my wardrobe, but I could never bring myself to wear a shirt that exposed my belly even a little while pregnant. Was I trying to put a barrier between myself and the many strangers who felt comfortable commenting on or touching my body? Was it part of my perplexing embarrassment over being such an obviously biological animal? Had I unknowingly embraced the Cartesian mind-body split for so long that my body’s sudden assertiveness made me doubt everything I knew about myself?
Perhaps ironically, strangers’ fascination with my body didn’t translate into much of an uptick in urban courtesy. In fact, I sensed a constant, low-grade reminder that I was now different, Other, and out of place. This was most obvious to me on the Tube, where I was rarely offered a seat during my rush hour commute. Posh businessmen deliberately buried their faces in the broadsheets, pretending not to see me. One time I relinquished my seat to an even more pregnant woman before anyone took notice of either of us. Anna Quindlen tells an identical story about being pregnant in New York, offering her seat to a woman who “looked like she should have been on her way to the hospital.” “I love New York,” Quindlen writes, “but it’s a tough place to be pregnant…. There’s no privacy in New York; everyone is right up against everyone else and they all feel compelled to say what they think.”40 People who have been pregnant share these sorts of stories with a wry chuckle, like old war stories, as if they’re rights of passage when you’re pregnant in the city. As if it’s all to be expected for daring to leave your home with your messy, inconvenient body.
My efforts to reclaim the spirit of the flâneuse resumed after Maddy was born. Maddy would sleep for ages if she was strapped into a baby carrier, snug against my chest. I’d plot a route to a newly opened Starbucks with my trusted London A-Z map book and head out for a simple treat: a latté and fresh scenery. These breaks in the exhausting routine of feeding, rocking, bathing, and so on felt like a tiny bit of freedom. I almost remembered what it was to be a young person in the city before having a baby.
Sometimes these outings went well, sometimes not. My attempts to be the mommy flâneuse were continually interrupted by the messy biology of a newborn. Places that used to feel welcoming and comfortable now made me feel like an outsider, an alien with