Gender, Space, and the Gaze in Post-Haussmann Visual Culture

Beyond the Flaneur
1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4724-4586-5
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 250 Seiten, Format (B × H): 252 mm x 180 mm, Gewicht: 706 g

Charles Baudelaire’s flâneur, as described in his 1863 essay "The Painter of Modern Life," remains central to understandings of gender, space, and the gaze in late nineteenth-century Paris, despite misgivings by some scholars. Baudelaire’s privileged and leisurely figure, at home on the boulevards, underlies theorizations of bourgeois masculinity and, by implication, bourgeois femininity, whereby men gaze and roam urban spaces unreservedly while women, lacking the freedom to either gaze or roam, are wedded to domesticity.

In challenging this tired paradigm and offering fresh ways to consider how gender, space, and the gaze were constructed, this book attends to several neglected elements of visual and written culture: the ubiquitous male beggar as the true denizen of the boulevard, the abundant depictions of well-to-do women looking (sometimes at men), the popularity of windows and balconies as viewing perches, and the overwhelming emphasis given by both male and female artists to domestic scenes. The book’s premise that gender, space, and the gaze have been too narrowly conceived by a scholarly embrace of Baudelaire’s flâneur is supported across the cultural spectrum by period sources that include art criticism, high and low visual culture, newspapers, novels, prescriptive and travel literature, architectural practices, interior design trends, and fashion journals.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Balducci, Temma

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunstgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunst, allgemein Einzelne Künstler: Biographien, Monografien

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1: Making up the Boulevard

Chapter 2: Gazing Women

Chapter 3: Windows and Balconies

Chapter 4: Men, Domesticity, and Family

Conclusion

Selected Bibliography

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Temma Balducci is an Associate Professor of Art History at Arkansas State University. She was co-editor of and contributor to the companion volumes Interior Portraiture and Masculine Identity in France, 1789-1914 and Women, Femininity, and Public Space in Nineteenth-Century European Visual Culture.