Claiming the Flâneur's Body: Cross-Dressing Women, Autobiographical Self-Fashioning, and the Pleasures of Passing and Not Passing as a Man on the Street
The experience of flânerie, associated primarily with urban capitals in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is often seen as hinging on a male, upper-class, white, and able body. In Western patriarchy these bodily privileges supposedly allow the flâneur to remain unnoticed whilst observing others. Questioning the exclusiveness of these privileges, Sandra Dinter’s analysis explores how the European women writers Flora Tristan, George Sand, and Vita Sackville-West attempt to claim male corporeality by walking publicly in male disguise and representing this experience in their memoirs. Dinter’s perceptive reading demonstrates that both moments—passing and not passing—generate pleasure for the women and serve as distinct occasions for their autobiographical self-fashionings. These representations to different degrees undermine or reinstate patriarchal norms, thus inviting both paranoid and reparative perspectives on flânerie.
The experience of flânerie, associated primarily with urban capitals in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is often seen as hinging on a male, upper-class, white, and able body. In Western patriarchy these bodily privileges supposedly allow the flâneur to remain unnoticed whilst observing others. Questioning the exclusiveness of these privileges, Sandra Dinter's analysis explores how the European women writers Flora Tristan, George Sand, and Vita Sackville-West attempt to claim male corporeality by walking publicly in male disguise and representing this experience in their memoirs. Dinter's perceptive reading demonstrates that both moments---passing and not passing---generate pleasure for the women and serve as distinct occasions for their autobiographical self-fashionings. These representations to different degrees undermine or reinstate patriarchal norms, thus inviting both paranoid and reparative perspectives on flânerie.