AustLit

Author's note: Women Walking: Fragments explores the way contemporary women encounter and interact with the city. Inspired by feminist writers contesting the masculine notion of the flâneur(Woolf 2008; Lessing 1972, 1993, 1998; Barnes 1996), this work explores ways of writing contemporary women into the city.'

This work takes up the tradition of writing about walking/the city and explores the female flâneur or flâneuse in her relationship to an Australian city, specifically Melbourne. It aims to make women’s place in and relationship to the city visible through fiction. It asks if the city is still (as it was for Benjamin and Baudelaire) a ‘male’ space and actively explores the gendered nature of constructions of the city.