or adapted to different environments. In this book I’ll share a variety of those kinds of projects, both old and new. My hope is that you can learn to see those alternatives on the ground, to have your own conversations about gender, feminism, and city life and find your own ways to take action on doing cities differently.
If you’ve ever been pregnant, the “geography closest in” gets real strange, fast. Suddenly, you’re someone else’s environment. And everything about how your body moves through the world and is perceived by others is about to change.
I was pregnant with my daughter Maddy over a typically dreary London winter and through what felt like an unusually warm spring and summer. I had a part-time office job in Kentish Town. My commute from Finchley Central was only five Tube stops but most days it felt interminable. When I worked a morning shift, my nausea would force me off the train at Archway where I’d stumble to a bench and try to calm my stomach before gingerly re-boarding a new train. Before I was visibly pregnant there was no chance of being offered a seat, no matter how waxy and green my face. This lack of hospitality didn’t improve much even after my belly expanded.
I was determined to be one of those pregnant people who carried on with their normal lives as though nothing had changed. This was long before Serena Williams won a Grand Slam tournament while pregnant but, I was channeling that kind of spirit. I was a recent women’s studies graduate with my own copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves. I was prepared to be fierce and stick to my feminist principles in the face of the pathologizing, misogynist medical profession. I soon found that since midwives still dominated pre- and post-natal care in Britain, my anger at the system was a little misdirected. But I wasn’t at all prepared for the way that my place in the city was changing.
I hadn’t yet heard of “feminist geography” but I was certainly a feminist, and my feminist self was bristling at every turn. My body had suddenly turned into public property, available for touching or comment. My body was a big inconvenience to others and they didn’t mind letting me know. My body’s new shape had taken away my sense of anonymity and invisibility in the city. I could no longer blend in, become part of the crowd, people watch. I was the one being watched.
I didn’t know how much I valued these things until they were gone. They didn’t magically re-appear after my daughter was born, either. Pregnancy and motherhood made the gendered city visible to me in high definition. I’d rarely been so aware of my embodiment. Of course my gender is embodied, but it’s always been there. Pregnancy was new and it made me see the city in new ways. The connection between embodiment and my experience of the city became much more visceral. While I’d experienced street harassment and fear, I had little sense of how deep, how systemic, and how geographical it all was.
As a woman, a complete sense of anonymity or invisibility in the city had never fully existed for me. The constant anticipation of harassment meant that any ability to glide along as one of the crowd was always fleeting. Nonetheless, privileges such as white skin and able-bodiedness gave me some measure of invisibility. Blending seamlessly into the urban crowd, freely traversing the streets, and engaging in detached but appreciative spectatorship have been held up as true urban ideals since the explosive growth of industrial cities. The figure of the flâneur, emerging prominently in Charles Baudelaire’s writing, is a gentleman who is a “passionate spectator” of the city, seeking to “become one flesh with the crowd,” at the centre of the action and yet invisible.31 The philosopher and writer of urban life Walter Benjamin further crystallized the flâneur as an essential urban character in the modern city, and urban sociologists such as Georg Simmel located traits like a “blasé attitude” and the ability to be anonymous as inherent to the new urban psychology.32 Not surprisingly, given the perspectives of these writers, the flâneur was always imagined as a man, not to mention one who is white and able-bodied.
Could the flâneur be female? Feminist urban writers have been divided here. Some see the model of the flâneur as an exclusionary trope to critique; others, as a figure to be reclaimed. For those who reject the idea, women can never fully escape into invisibility because their gender marks them as objects of the male gaze.33 Others say the female flâneur has always existed. Calling her the flâneuse, these writers point to examples like Virginia Woolf. In Woolf’s 1930 essay “Street Haunting: A London Adventure,” the narrator imagines glimpses into strangers’ minds as she walks the streets of London, musing that “to escape is the greatest of pleasures; street haunting in winter the greatest of adventures.”34 In her own diary, Woolf wrote “to walk alone in London is the greatest rest,” implying that she found a measure of peace and detachment among the surging crowds.35 Geographer Sally Munt proposed the idea of the lesbian flâneur as an urban character who sidesteps the usual pathway of the heterosexual gaze and finds pleasure in observing other women.36
Lauren Elkin attempts to recover the invisible history of the flâneuse in her book Flâneuse: Women Walk the City. Elkin argues that women have been simultaneously hyper-visible and invisible in the streets. Always watched, yet written out of accounts of urban life. She describes her own youthful experiences of flânerie on the streets of Paris, long before she knew it had a name: “I could walk for hours in Paris and never ‘get’ anywhere, looking at the way the city was put together, glimpsing its unofficial history here and there…. I was on the lookout for residue, for texture, for accidents and encounters and unexpected openings.”37 Elkin insists the reluctance of men like Baudelaire, Benjamin, and Simmel to imagine a female flâneur comes from their inability to notice women acting in ways that didn’t fit their preconceived notions. Women walking in public were more likely to be read as streetwalkers (sex workers) than as women out for another purpose. But Elkin writes, “If we tunnel back, we find there always was a flâneuse passing Baudelaire in the street.”38
I have to wonder though, is the flâneuse ever pregnant or pushing a stroller? Artist and scholar Katerie Gladdys’ video “Stroller Flâneur” plays on the word stroller (a synonym for flâneur) as it depicts her pushing a baby stroller through her Gainesville, Florida neighbourhood. As the mommy flâneuse, she searches for “patterns and narratives in the genealogies of architectural structures and topographies while simultaneously searching for items of interest for [her] son.” Gladdys claims that “the performance of strolling a child is indeed one of the social processes of inhabiting and appropriating the public spaces” of the city. While I agree, and I would argue that moms pushing strollers are invisible in their own way, they’re not usually associated with the classic figure of the flâneur.39 And even the reclaimed flâneuse still inhabits a “normal” body, one able to move in unremarkable ways through the streets. None of the writers who talk about flâneuserie give mention to the pregnant body. While not all those who experience pregnancy are women (e.g. trans men), it’s certainly a state rife with gendered assumptions. If it was already a stretch to imagine the female version of the flâneur, then the idea of a pregnant flâneur is likely beyond the pale.
It’s impossible to blend in when your body has suddenly become public property. Although women often experience comments on our bodies and uninvited physical contact, pregnancy and motherhood elevate these intrusions to a new level. People read my protruding belly as if it said, “rub here please!” I was expected to cheerfully welcome all manner of unsolicited advice and to express appropriate amounts of shame and remorse for any lapse in following the reams of often contradictory “expert” tips on eating, drinking, vitamins, exercise, work, etc. I was no longer an individual making my own choices. It was like they’d been crowdsourced without my consent.
