The Practices of Flâneuses within the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Feminist Geography vis-à-vis Automation Discourse
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2021
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Other Conference Item
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yes
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Abstract
The article, drawing upon Leslie Kern’s Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World (2020), examines the interconnections between “feminist geography” – a sub-discipline of human geography that applies the theories, methods, and critiques of feminism to the study of the human environment, society, and geographical space – and the methodologies of history and theory of architecture and urban planning. One of the questions that is addressed in the aforementioned book is the following: “Could the flâneur be female?”. The practice of flânerie has been threatened during the pandemic. A question that arises is that concerning the relationship of women and men to public space during these challenging times. Books such as Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse: Women Walk the City are useful for responding to this question. Elkin argues that “women have been simultaneously hyper-visible and invisible in the streets”, underscoring the fact that Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, and Georg Simmel neglected the role of female flâneurs because of their “inability to notice women acting in ways that didn’t fit their preconceived notions”. The article sheds light on how the status of “flâneuse” has changed within the context of the pandemic. It also explores how the home-office conditions due to the COVID-19 pandemic has challenged the approaches of “feminist geography”. It does not only draw upon an ensemble of works on “feminist geography”, but also on a broad literature concerning automation discourse, such as Aaron Benanav’s Automation and the Future of Work (2020) among other. Benanav addresses the role of women in the fourth and sixth chapters of the book entitled “A Low Demand for Labor” and “Necessity and Freedom” respectively. The paper relates the arguments of these two chapters to the questions raised by feminist geographers, relating the current home-office conditions to Benanav’s remark that “social distinctions between waged and unwaged work, which have historically consigned women to the ‘hidden abode’ of household production, would have to be abandoned”, and exploring how the methods of history and theory of architecture and urban planning could take into account and facilitate this endeavor to reject such social distinctions.
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ETH Zurich, Chair of the History and Theory of Urban Design
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V Congresso Internacional Arquitectura e Género | ACÇÃO. Feminismos e a espacialização das resistências (2021)
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Subject
feminist geography; Leslie Kern; Lauren Elkin; Aaron Benanav; COVID-19 pandemic; Automation; Flâneuse; public space; home-office conditions; Labor; Women
Organisational unit
09643 - Avermaete, Tom / Avermaete, Tom
02655 - Netzwerk Stadt u. Landschaft ARCH u BAUG / Network City and Landscape ARCH and BAUG