Walking in the city: urban space, stories, and gender

Abstract

This paper outlines a feminist reading of Michel de Certeau's work on urban space and narrative in The Practice of Everyday Life. De Certeau offers a persuasive, highly poetic theoretical framework for understanding the production of urban space and the way it is experienced – and ‘written’ – through the everyday practices of a city’s inhabitants. The role of sexual difference in the production of this space is somewhat underdeveloped, however. In response to this gap, and with the help of Elizabeth Grosz’s essay Cities bodies, I develop a feminist analysis of the urban subjectivity implied in his work.