ABSTRACT
Since being given form in Baudelaire’s Paris in the 1860s, the flâneur has claimed a central position in Western urban culture. Cast as an inherently male figure, the flâneur occupies the city spaces he traverses, bestowed with the privilege to observe and consume the urban milieu at leisure. In recent decades, a small smattering of feminist scholars have sought to construct and examine the possibility of a female flâneur, or flâneuse. In this essay, I seek to complicate this picture, via the queer potential of the butch flâneur, examining ways in which the butch occupies and traverses the city space, using their butchness as a passport to look, taste, and consume the delights of the streets. Oral history provides a way to understand and interrogate queer lived experience, thereby allowing for a more nuanced and detailed picture of urban butch experience to emerge.
