Cities and Gender 2 - PowerPoint Presentation

Slide1

Cities and Gender 2

The

FlaneuseSlide2

The private and the Public

In

Victorian

culture: private as feminine, public as masculine

Apotheosis of modernity: associated with progress vs a ‘dangerous’ place for

women

Moralizing

and

regulatory

discourses

Safety

, decorum

propriety, surveillance (Foucault), fear of contamination

The

myth of the metropolis as freedom, disorder, fear of prostitution, immoralitySlide3

The public woman

“The public woman” as

threat

: “The very presence of unattended – unowned – women constituted a threat both to male power and a temptation to male ‘frailty’” (Wilson 74).

Movement of middle-class women: more successfully restricted

the prostitute as a public woman,

spectacle

“In British society it was the young marriageable woman under thirty years of age who was most rigorously chaperoned; married women, governesses and old maids had rather more – if hardly flattering – freedom” (Wilson 74)Slide4

The term: flaneur

Derived from the Irish word for libertine!

Post-revolutionary Parisian figure

“monsieur

bonhomme

”, 1806

 shopping, window-shopping

cafés, restaurants

Watches the behavior of the lower ranks of society (soldiers, workers,

grisettes

)

Observes dresses, fashion

Observes women

Marginal

writerSlide5

commodification

Window-shopping, fascination, everything is for sale in the city

 tension between the position of the

creative artist

(innovative, subversive perspective, etc.) and fascination with the

commodity

New forms of writing

, e.g. the magazine article, voyeuristic literature. Less political, more entertaining, amusing articles about everyday life, gossips, etc.

Journalists are similar to upper-class dandies (

kracauer

)

Blasé attitude

(

simmel

): the attitude of the man who has been bought,

enetrtaines

the philistines they despised

Prostitution symbolizes commodification: the body of the woman is soldSlide6

Feminist interventions

Position of women in 19

th

century

paris

:

Grísettes

,

lorettes

. Women who lived by their wits and sexuality

Feminist readings: the

flaneur

is the embodiment of the

male gaze

(

lacanian

term). “He represents men’s visual and voyeuristic mastery over women” (Wilson 79)

Janett

wolff

: there is no female

flaneur

Challenges the opposition

of public and

privateSlide7

The place of women

Women as object: dressed to show their husband’s wealth

The grand narrative of the angel of the house makes atrocities committed

on the streets invisible (Wolff)

End of the 19

th

century: women were emerging more and more into

public spaces

The

male gaze annihilates the threat posed by female subjectivity, woman as other Slide8

Art

Elizabeth

siddall

as

dante

Gabriel

rossetti’s

muse

Notion of woman as sign, psychoanalytic study of meaning – reduction of woman to sign, devoid of agency

The tantalizing urban spectacle, even misery is

aestheticisedSlide9

Empowerment – Wilson’s argument

George sand: male

attire

Danger

posed by unfeminine working-class women

“unnatural” types of urban femininity: the prostitute, the lesbian, the androgynous woman, the childless woman sexualizing urban space (Baudelaire)

the

paradox: tension between the ideal portrayal of the

flaneur

(artist, free,

etc.) and the

insecure position of artists

in a more and more commercialized societySlide10

“The flaneur

has never

existed”

“since he was the embodiment of the special blend of excitement, boredom and horror evoked in the metropolis” (Wilson 87)

“his masculinity is unstable, caught up in the violent dislocation that characterizes urbanization” (Wilson 88)

“the only

defence

against transgressive desire is to turn either oneself or the object of desire to stone. One such attempt may by the representation of women in art as petrified, fixed sexual objects. Another is the transformation of the masculine self into its own object of desire. This is the project of the dandy, who also in the process turns himself to stone” (Wilson 88)Slide11

Afterword

Contemporary versions

Her position (vs

wolff

)

Critique of

lacanian

theory Slide12

Gender, generation and the city

“perhaps the time to take up a career as a

flaneuse

is after retirement” (Wolff 7)

Old women are invisible – does this mean they have more “freedom” in the city?

Older women as ghosts

Cult of beauty, privileging of youth

Both Wilson and

wolff

: how to construct a more positive, viable theory that do not simply posit women as objects, as other

Old age as nee freedom? E. said,

on late style

Why does the postmodern loosening of the strict conceptual model of private vs. public provide possibilities for re-integrating older women into the frame?