Dinter S (2022)
Publication Language: English
Publication Type: Book chapter / Article in edited volumes
Publication year: 2022
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Edited Volumes: The Male Body in Representation. Returning to Matter
Series: Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender
City/Town: Cham
Pages Range: 173-194
ISBN: 978-3-030-88603-5
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-88604-2_8
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.
APA:
Dinter, S. (2022). 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. In Carmen Dexl, Silvia Gerlsbeck (Eds.), The Male Body in Representation. Returning to Matter. (pp. 173-194). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
MLA:
Dinter, Sandra. "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 Male Body in Representation. Returning to Matter. Ed. Carmen Dexl, Silvia Gerlsbeck, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. 173-194.
BibTeX: Download