ABSTRACT
Scholarship devoted to the enduring significance of flanerie, from its historical origins in early-nineteenth-century Paris to its most well-known iterations by Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, and a host of writers and critics throughout the twentieth century, is something of a cottage industry in contemporary visual and cultural studies as well as within historical studies of modern and postmodern urban cultures. The phenomenological inspiration derived from flanerie has played a central component in genealogies of modern experience that can be traced to late-nineteenth-century urban visual spectacles such as window displays, wax museums, and early cinema. The shopping adventures of Keller and Thomson and the protest activities of disabled veterans on the streets of Paris may point to the different semiotic registers in which public definitions of disability were communicated and understood in the popular imagination, but they also point to the reasons why the liberal, autonomous subject of modernity must be able-bodied for canonical understandings of flanerie to survive.
