Reading: Elkin Lauren. Flaneuse-ing Response

Lauren Elkin is a writer, critic and an incurable wanderer. She has written many essays on various books and cultures, which have appeared in several publications such as, The New York Times or The Guardian etc.  She tends to write about women’s writing, experimental poetics, and visual culture, etc. especially photography.

The reading I read, which is from a chapter I read under the name of, ‘Flaneuse-ing’, is originally from a book called, ‘Flaneuse; Women walk the City.’ The reading is about how women walk the city as stated in the title above but not just about that, it also talks about how these women found their personal freedom and inspiration through walking these streets on foot.

I would say that this reading is connected to the theme, ‘STREET’, due to the idea that it is all about how women observe the city and how the author believes that woman in general can also be flaneur’s which is a term that means, ‘ A man who strolls around observing society’. This is why it sort of contradicts itself as due to the term typically meaning a man is a flaneur and not a woman, this is later stated in the reading:

“ There is no question of inventing the, ‘ Flaneuse’,” (word changed by the author to make it sound feminine earlier in the reading), wrote Janet Wolff in an off-quoted essay on the subject, such a character was rendered impossible by the sexual discussions of the nineteenth century’.

This shows that a few people especially, Janet Wolff didn’t believe that woman could be flaneur’s, and there was no such thing in the 19^th century. This is why Lauren Elkin wrote this book, ‘Flaneuse’, to discuss and show the forgotten history of woman artists who also wondered the city.

I would say that it was easy to make the connection of the reading to the theme because majority of it was about a flaneur in the street but more about the women points of view on it, although it did mention some male flaneur’s and how they work.

The most interesting thing I found about the reading was that Lauren Elkin made the book sound almost like a diary but in a story like way. I feel like the theme has a rich history however up until recently, it has mainly been from a male’s perspective so hearing it from a woman perspective was very interesting. I liked the idea of comparing and contrasting ideas from males and females points of view as you can then roughly outline your own idea from those interests. It’s the idea of being stereotypical in a way as every time you think of flaneur, you would think male not particularly woman especially in the 19^th century so to get a perspective from a woman’s point of view has opened my mind to a different way of thinking about street, as Lauren says, “I walk because it confers- or restores a feeling of placeness”.

  During the reading I got a little confused throughout as it was written in different tenses or what it seemed like different tenses, where she was talking about herself but also talking about other people such as: Virginia Wolff, Sophie Calle etc.  Some phrases where also little bit hard to grasp but I managed to get the overall image/idea of what the whole thing was about in the end as mentioned at the start.  I would recommend this reading to the rest of the class, as it is an interesting read and not too long either. Especially if you would like to find out more about flaneur-ing but from a woman’s point of view rather than just a males.

Quotation:  " Learning to see meant not being able to look away; to walk in the streets of Paris was to walk the thin line of fate that divided us from each other". 

Photo by: Ruth Orkin