The Flâneur through the Female Gaze: A Legitimization of Street Harassment?

Abstract

The notion of dérive introduced by Debord (1957) involves a mapping that blends physical exploration with personal experiences, primarily aesthetic, for the participant. However, its practitioners, reminiscent of the Baudelairian flâneur archetype, typically exhibit a stable identity: they tend to be Western, middle-aged bourgeois men navigating a public space molded by capitalist and patriarchal ideologies, catering to consumerist and erotic perspectives (Jacobs, 1961; Berger, 1972). Consequently, their encounters are shaped by a privileged stance within the urban landscape, which is perceived as a stage offering experiences not equally accessible to those existing on the fringes of norms often to extras this theatrical setting. This contribution will focus on the case of women and will be based on different literary and cinematic fragments, and on two real-life cases. After their analysis, it will be shown that Western imagination takes the female pedestrian as an object liable to be pursued by men, regardless of the violation of her right to anonymity granted by the metropolis (Wilson, 1991; Kern, 2020). These challenges result in a psychogeography that, at its best, manifests as disjointed, disrupted by romanticized and sexist male attitudes.