women in urban nightscape

I’ m thinking about the flaneuse.

My perversion and appropriation of Baudelaire’s and (modernism’s) concept of the flaneur who walks the streets of Paris; he's part of the body of the ebbing crowd, yet separate while he composes poetry in his mind. The intellectual prince who strolls through the urban landscape, the sparkling nightscape.
I’m thinking about the inability of women in the same period to engage in flaneurie. There were no flaneuses then. Women’s mobility has always been strictly controlled. I did a project with Diana in third year in which I explored the idea of a contemporary flaneuse, unable to walk the nightscape for reasons of fear, unseen violence. The nightscape no longer an intellectual artistic journey thru metropolitan spaces, but an ominous oppressor with fingers that are dark alleys, straining to grab, pull, prod.


[Now I’m Kathy Acker, rip-off red looking for women to prey upon]

I’m connecting this idea of the modernist flaneur/ lack of flaneuse, with the phenomenon of prostitution. In many ways streetwalkers were the flaneuses of the fin-de-siecle. They were the only women out at night without chaperones, though they certainly had escorts. What does this lineage suggest?

Can I tie in the Contagious Diseases Act? First introduced in 1864 in Britain, actively fought by Josephine Butler, finally repealed in 1886. The government recognized that the Navy was over-run with venereal disease. Instead of forcing officers to undergo examination and treatment, they introduced the CD Act which required all port cities to keep a list of “prostitutes” who would have to undergo enforced examination for disease (infection).
How to distinguish who is a prostitute? Any woman suspected to be a sex worker had to submit to an examination. If she refused, she was confined to hard labour for 9 months. If she consented and was found to be infected, she was confined to a lock-hostipal until cured (no hard labour). If she consented to examination and was found to be healthy, then she was obviously free to go, having been a victim of state enforced “instrumental rape”, a term coined by Josephine Butler and her “Ladies National Assoc. for Repeal of CD Acts”. [please imagine the horrified masses contemplating these dignified middle class “ladies” orating on prostitution, vaginal examinations, and rape].

Can I link these elements with the experiences of prostitutes in Canada? in Edmonton? In East hastings? Those forgotten flaneuses of the night (to be overly romantic and not at all practical), every movement controlled, their fates somehow decided? The assumption by society that men require sexual services and therefore we should set aside a class of women to see to this need?

I’m building a constellation here for development. musing aloud.