ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses peculiar closures on the issue of sexuality in bourgeois Paris. How sexual difference is inscribed will be determined by the specificity of the practice and the processes of representation. The chapter explores two axes on which these issues can be considered—that of space and that of the look. It argues that the social process defined by the term modernity was experienced spatially in terms of access to the spectacular city which was open to a class and gender-specific gaze. The chapter points to a coincidence between the spaces of modernity and the spaces of masculinity as they intersect in the territory of cross-class sexual exchange. It presents feminist analyses of the founding moments of modernity and modernism, to discern its sexualized structures, to discover past resistances and differences, to examine how women producers developed alternative models for negotiating modernity and the spaces of femininity.
