Call for Papers

"Today's Global Flâneuse "

Special issue of Wagadu, Journal of Transnational Women's and Gender Studies
(Fall/Winter 2009)
wagadu.org

This special issue aims to explore the possibilities of a dynamic flâneuse
on urban modernity's global stage in the 21st century.  Scholarship has long
moved away from flânerie's classical definition featuring a bourgeois,
indolent male wandering around 19th-century industrializing Paris for the
sake of modernity and art. Urbanists still grant a persistent relevance to
old-fashioned, ambulatory flânerie as an effective technique for the
processing of rapidly modernizing cities. Yet today's urban discourses also
admit flânerie's fruitful application to globalizing cities far beyond the
male-centered, Franco-European roots of the concept as developed by Charles
Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin.  Flânerie's conceptual expansion is due in
part to a keenly renewed interest in modernity and its protagonists, which
globalization has rekindled.   This time around, theoretical flânerie's
current global revival must incorporate the flâneuse with much more rigor.
An important body of scholarly work dating from the feminist priorities of
the late 1980s has thoroughly revised former notions about the flâneuse's
relative visibility on the streets of 19th-century Paris.  This scholarship
definitively asserts the flâneuse as a distinct reality in the 19th-century
metropolis of the west, making a convincing case that public (so-called
masculine) and domestic (so-called feminine) spheres were not so mutually
exclusive as to completely preclude a proactive feminine presence in the
streets.  Just as her male counterpart, the flâneuse could, within certain
limitations, attain necessary incognito on the street, be a detached
observer, and produce social criticism and art from her experience.  Wagadu
would like to publish a similar body of papers that analyzes the feminine
filtration of the urban for the late 20th and 21st centuries, which has yet
to be produced.  We invite interdisciplinary contributions from the areas of
art history, anthropology, sociology, geography, cultural studies, leisure
studies, sensory studies, and mobility studies, among many other fields.

Some of the topics of investigation may include:
--descriptions of the creative output of the 21st-century artist-flâneuse
and how this differs from/aligns with the urban subjects of the
artist-flâneur
--ethnographies of the flâneuse experience in specific globalizing cities
outside of the west in particular
--designations of where and why urban female subjectivity remains
problematic to the point of invisibility
--discussions of today's equivalents of the 19th-century Parisian café,
theater, and department store that extend the flâneuse's presence in urban
spaces where it had    previously been threatened
--identification of urban circumstances rendering the flâneur invisible and
the flâneuse more visible
--constructions of the flâneuse as a signifier of modernity, especially
considering the tenor of  today's resumption of the modernity debate
emphasizing the quotidian, the affective, the embodied, and the
multisensorial beyond the merely ocular


Please send abstracts (250 words maximum) by October 15, 2008.  Submissions
should be sent electronically in APA format to kramerk@cortland.edu


Kathryn Kramer
Art and Art History Department
221 Dowd Fine Arts
SUNY Cortland
Cortland, NY  13045, USA

Office    607-753-4290
Fax       607-753-5967
Email     kramerk@cortland.edu <mailto:kramerk@cortland.edu>


Other inquiries:
Mecke Nagel, State University of New York at Cortland (Editor-in-Chief of Wagadu)
nagelm@cortland.edu