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The ‘Flâneuse’ Walks the Streets with the Female Gaze

REVIEW / USA

2 October, 2017

Words: Shu-Ling Chua

 

Literature, London, New York, Paris, Tokyo, Venice, England, France, Italy, Japan, USA, 

“My most meaningful experience with the city was not through its literature, its food or its museums… but through all that walking.”

Part cultural meander, part memoir, Flâneuse brims with intellectual curiosity and empathy. Rather than setting a definitive history of the flâneuse, Lauren Elkin invites readers to explore the relationship between city, women and creativity, through lived experience, art and a life of learning.

Elkin’s bio reads: “Originally from New York (the suburbs, then the city), I moved to Paris in 2004; along the way I’ve spent varying periods of time in London, Venice, Tokyo, and Hong Kong.” Flâneuse traces her steps through these cities (except Hong Kong) and how each has changed her.

Noting most French dictionaries recognise only the male flâneur [a man who strolls the streets observing society], Elkin defines the flâneuse as “a determined resourceful woman keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city, and the liberating possibilities of a good walk.” In doing so, she establishes the feminist lens for the book: “We would love to be invisible the way a man is… But if we’re so conspicuous, why have we been written out of the history of cities?”

“The flâneuse is not merely a female flâneur, but a figure to be reckoned with, and inspired by, all on her own.”

She presents a series of portraits—from nineteenth-century novelist George Sand to artist Sophie Calle, from war correspondent Martha Gellhorn to filmmaker Agnès Varda—illustrating the flâneuse is not merely a female flâneur, but a figure to be reckoned with, and inspired by, all on her own.

Her writing on Venice and Tokyo, especially the latter, are less anchored in place than those set in New York and Paris. Neither felt like home to Elkin, so she chooses to focus on the psychological. In Tokyo, not by choice but for her then-boyfriend, it is little wonder she felt lost and frustrated. Were there Japanese flâneuse? I suspect Elkin felt unqualified to answer, given the language and cultural barriers she recounts. It is nevertheless a curious and disappointing omission.
“Traces of the past city are, somehow, traces of the selves we might once have been. Here and there we find them, and we fetishise them.”

Elkin neither fetishises nor romanticises cities. She tempers the sense of possibility they inspire—“The city turns you on, gets you going, moving, thinking, wanting, engaging. The city is life itself.”—with the uglier aspects: poverty, homelessness and violence in form of revolutions, protests and war. Watching the Occupy movement disband reminds her of the student uprisings of May 1968, which in turn flows into a discussion of borders and immigration. Cities cannot exist without people.

“I found her [the flâneuse] using cities as performance spaces, or as hiding places; as places to seek fame and fortune or anonymity; as places to liberate herself from oppression or to help those who are oppressed; as places to declare her independence; as places to change the world or be changed by it.”

“We are made of all the places we’ve loved, or of all the places where we’ve changed.”

Lauren Elkin in ‘Flâneuse’

At its heart, Flâneuse is a meditation on how “we are made of all the places we’ve loved, or of all the places where we’ve changed.” Our memories (and the ghosts of flâneuses past) overlay these places, forming an “emotional map” unique to each of us. Indeed, Elkin quotes Varda: “By understanding people you understand places better, by understanding places you understand people better.”

Elkin closes with an extensive bibliography and collection of notes, reflecting her background as an academic and enabling the reader to explore further, should they wish to. Flâneuse challenges the way we see cities, those we know and those we do not, and in doing so, our place in the world. It reminds us to look beyond surface. Like returning home from a holiday, it makes the familiar new.

Flâneuse by Lauren Elkin, 2015, 336 pp.

Notes

Shu-Ling Chua was born in Melbourne, Australia, to Malaysian-Chinese parents. Her work has appeared in Peril Magazine, Seizure, The Lifted Brow, Pencilled In and other publications and was highly commended in the Feminartsy Memoir Prize 2017.

hellopollyanna.blogspot.com.au / T: @hellopollyanna / I: @hellopollyanna

View More: Book Review, Review, Literature, England, France, Italy, Japan, USA, London, New York, Paris, Tokyo, Venice, All

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Issue No. 1

In Issue No. 1 we meet Australian fashion icon Jenny Kee, translator from Italian Ann Goldstein and French-Cuban music duo Ibeyi. We learn about Ramadan, the Aboriginal ball game Marngrook, the Kiribati dance, the art of pickling, and the importance of home. And we see what it’s like to dress up in Myanmar, live in Cuernavaca, make ceramics from different soil, and walk the streets of Florence.

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Issue No. 2

In Issue No. 2 we meet New York-based Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, NASA astronaut Stephanie Wilson, and Croatian painter Stipe Nobilo. We discover how the French protect their language and the way women—all around the world—have used textiles as their political voice. We listen to lovers rock, prepare a boisterous Korean barbecue, venture to go to Feria de Jerez and eat our way around Hong Kong.

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Issue No. 4

In Issue No. 4 we meet Nigerian-born artist Toyin Ojih Odutola, Indigenous Australian Elders Uncle Bob Smith and Aunty Caroline Bradshaw, and Palestinian-American chef and artist Amanny Ahmad. We peer inside the Parisian ateliers Lesage and Lemarié, muse over the iconic lines of European chair design and celebrate the colourful woodblock prints of Japanese artist Awazu Kiyoshi. And we venture along Morocco’s Honey Highway, get lost in the markets of Oaxaca and discover the favours of Ghana.

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Issue No. 5

In Issue No. 5 we travel to the mountains with Etel Adnan, along coastlines wherever waves roll in, and then all over the world through the photographic archive of Lindsay James Stanger. We celebrate hair braiding in South Africa, Salasacan weaving techniques in Ecuador, Vedic jewellery traditions and the new sound of Ukraine. We meet artist Cassi Namoda, choreographer Yang Liping and lace-maker Mark Klauber. And we visit a bakery in Tel Aviv, discover the joys of making arak, and spend a summer stretching mozzarella in Italy.

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