A post by Smaranda Aldea

To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world (Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life).

Street walking – free wandering, without aim or worry. Flâneur extraordinaire, Baudelaire brings into relief the embodied freedom such street walking – flânerie – entails. The flâneur is at home in the urban world: he is there to saunter and observe, trusting in his own invisibility – a liberating kind of invisibility. Lauren Elkin writes, ‘Flâneuse [flanne-euhze], noun, from the French. Feminine form of flâneur [flanne-euhr], an idler, a dawdling observer, usually found in cities. That is an imaginary definition. Most French dictionaries don’t even include the word’ (Elkin 2016, 7). There is a culturally coded, gendered dimension to flânerie: its radical embodied freedom is something most women can only imagine. What happens when those of us who, due to deeply sedimented, embodied fears that unavoidably condition our urban walking experiences, imagine Baudelaire’s empowered yet relaxed invisible freedom?