The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Consumption and Consumer Studies

Flâneur/Flânerie

STEPHEN L. WEARING

University of Technology, Sydney, Australia

DOI: 10.1002/9781118989463.wbeccs119

The original flâneur was regarded as a new kind of urban dweller who had the time to wander, watch, and browse in the public spaces of the emerging modern city (Benjamin 1973) – a poet, an artist, and a “stroller.” The flâneur wandered the city watching the urban milieu, observing people, and window-shopping. However, in the act of strolling the flâneur did not just observe life but was seemingly engaged in an “archaeological” process of unearthing the myths and “collective dreams” of modernity (Frisby 1986, 224). The flâneur was a gentleman who stood wholly outside the production process (Wilson 1995) and was away from home and in search of difference.

The flâneur was unquestionably male, and flânerie was a way of experiencing and occupying space that was available only – or predominantly – to men. As Wolff (1985) points out, “There is no question of inventing the flâneuse: the essential point is that such a character was rendered impossible by the sexual divisions of the nineteenth century” (p. 45). According to this view, the flâneur's freedom to wander at will through the city is essentially a masculine freedom. Thus the very idea of the flâneur reveals it to be a gendered concept (Wilson 1995, 65). But while the signs and symbols he searched for through his use and observations of space may have been those of the collective, the flâneur remained detached from ...