journal of visual culture
Disabling the Flâneur
David Serlin
Abstract
This article uses a photograph of the famous American blind advocate
Helen Keller window-shopping in Paris during the late 1930s to
meditate on and, ultimately, to challenge the scholarly literature that
limits the way we understand the concept of the flâneur, the
celebrated street-walker who has been an icon of urban modernity
since the 19th century. The article re-evaluates narratives of urban
modernity by suggesting that, in terms of charting genealogies of
modern subjectivity, the sensorial and tactile experiences of disabled
people should be included alongside the able-bodied privileges of the
flâneur. The photograph of Keller is juxtaposed with the image of a
group of disabled veterans to explore how the gendered dimensions
of disability were deployed in French visual culture in the interwar
period. The article closes with a meditation on the possible limits of
representing disability in the contemporary French public sphere.
Keywords
1930s disability flâneur gender modernity Paris photography
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On 29 January 1937, an editor for Le Soir, one of Paris’s many competing
daily newspapers, made arrangements to photograph Helen Keller windowshopping on the fashionable avenue des Champs-Élysées. Keller, the world’s
most famous – and, arguably, most photographed – blind person, visited
Paris during a brief tour of Europe before preparing for her historic journey
to Japan in the spring. The following morning, on 30 January, Keller and
Polly Thomson (Keller’s assistant for over two decades and primary traveling
companion after Anne Sullivan’s death just three months earlier in October
1936) took breakfast at the Hotel Lancaster on the rue de Berri and went out
promenading on the avenue, stopping long enough for one of Le Soir’s
photographers to preserve the moment for posterity (see Figure 1). Later
journal of visual culture [http://vcu.sagepub.com]
Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Vol 5(2): 193–208 [1470-4129(200608)5:2]10.1177/1470412906066905
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Figure 1 Helen Keller (right) and her companion, Polly Thomson,
window-shopping on the avenue des Champs-Élysées, Paris. Originally
published in Le Soir (Paris), 31 January, 1937. © Bettmann/Corbis.
Reproduced with permission.
that day, Keller recorded the event, with self-conscious delight, in the journal
that she kept of her daily activities:
Polly and I walked out with [the photographer] and he took pictures of
us on the Champs-Élysées beside a shop window resplendent with Paris
hats and gowns . . . Seeing everybody here in the pink of fashion
doesn’t tend to lull my feminine vanity. (Keller, 1938: 164)
In the photograph, Keller and Thomson stand side by side in front of a
boutique window showcasing a selection of belted and embroidered dresses,
patterned chemises with cravats, and form-fitting cloche hats in delicate, light
fabrics, suggestive of the coming spring, which stand in enormous contrast
to the textured, heavy winter coats worn by the two passers-by. Their apparent delight in and longing for the consumer goods that have captured their
attention is marked not only by the message that Keller communicates
directly into Thomson’s hand, the paleness of which is centered against the
backdrop of their black winter coats, but also by the reflections of both
women mirrored in the window’s glass that seem to haunt the shop’s interior
and our reception of the event. Indeed, the sumptuous display behind glass
serves as a kind of visual analogue for Keller herself, who experiences the
clothing in the shop window not through tactile means but through virtual
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Serlin Disabling the Flâneur
projection as mediated through Thomson’s gaze and subsequent description. Keller, who was 57 when the photograph was taken, clearly had more
than a passing interest in clothes, which gave her the space to engage the
tactile pleasures of the phenomenological world while simultaneously
satisfying her own ‘feminine vanity’. The day after posing for Le Soir’s
photographer, for instance, Keller described in her diary a visit to the atelier
of the grande couturieuse Elsa Schiaparelli, who was only too happy to have
her material creations linked to the world’s most famous blind person, a
person who wanted to be recognized as blind but also irreducibly female. ‘I
was sorry that [one of Schiaparelli’s dresses] could not be made for me in a
day,’ she wrote disappointedly, ‘but my hands were crammed with loveliness
as one robe after another appeared’ (Keller, 1938: 169).
One could also argue that, for all of its putative playfulness, the photograph’s
two mutually constitutive subjects – the two women on the one hand and the
boutique’s goods on the other – are divided practically down the middle,
suggesting a symbiosis of theme and form as well as a distinct separation, if
not a potential gulf, between its two halves. Such a division is not an
insignificant insight into Keller’s own biography. As Kim E. Nielsen has
argued, representations of Keller in the popular media during the course of
her life tended to embody the dialectic between 19th-century gestures of
sentimental womanhood and 20th-century instantiations of the New Woman.
Images of Keller equivocate between the ‘publicly pitied deaf and blind
young virgin’ and ‘the politically safe, but glorified, superblind saintly spinster’ (Nielsen, 2004: 50). Nielsen argues that, trapped within this gendered
logic of comprehensibility, Keller frequently tempered her public persona by
fulfilling expectations of what the public wanted her to be and, when
necessary, taking the appropriate measures to distance herself from other
disabled people in order to assert claims to a more normative subjectivity.
Keller’s desire to be seen as special and on her terms, however, was not
incompatible with the editorial goals of a daily newspaper like Le Soir, which
sought to present Keller and Thomson as special yet also infinitely capable of
performing the predictable rituals of female conspicuous consumption. Is it
not unseemly, then, to ask: for what audience(s) was this photograph
intended, and for what purposes? If the photograph is simply a news item
lifted from daily life in Paris during the late 1930s, then what, exactly, is
newsworthy about it, and what elements of urban culture does it document?
Perhaps the photograph’s explicit commercial power and unapologetic
consumerism – both the convention of window-shopping and the adaptation
of Keller and Thomson within it – capture the imagination precisely because
they confirm the promise of a certain kind of normative subject position that
under the right circumstances the disabled person, for whom Keller serves
metonymically, might perform in public. As Rosemarie Garland Thomson
(2002) has written, ‘Realist disability photography is the rhetoric of equality,
most often turned utilitarian . . . Realism domesticates disability’ (p. 69).
Unlike photographs of disabled figures in the urban milieu such as Paul
Strand’s famous Blind Woman (1917), for instance, a watershed moment in
a genealogy of ‘high’ modern figurations of disability, the image of Keller and
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Thomson might have functioned somewhat differently within early 20thcentury French popular media (Mirzoeff, 1995: 51–3). The blind figure in
traditional 18th- and 19th-century French art, as Nicholas Mirzoeff has argued,
was almost always gendered male, though exceptions – as in the case of the
female ‘blind justice’ – conceded more to mythological tropes than to social
realities. A categorical icon in the pantheon of Western cultural fantasies, from
Tiresias onward, of the blind person whose judicious inner eye can ‘see’
beyond the superficial distractions of the external world, such figures were
used in the political iconography of the early republic to demonstrate the
Enlightenment triumph of humanist reason in order to build a new egalitarian
society that would replace old aristocratic corruption. Well into the 20th
century, however, the blind were far more accustomed either to social isolation in institutions far from the public view or, in more dire circumstances,
survival through street begging than the metaphorical insight endowed upon
them by artists and philosophers. Indeed, if there is a common thread within
disability history in the 19th and early 20th centuries, it is not that people
with physical and cognitive impairments went traipsing down the ChampsÉlysées but instead that they were deliberately segregated from their fellow
citizens, occupying domestic or rehabilitative or institutional spaces where
they might be cared for (if they were cared for at all), and routinely excluded
and often prohibited from public spaces. The vaunted promises of French
republican values, in other words, rang hollow for the disabled and instead
barred them from cultural recognition and political participation except,
perhaps, for those whose wealth or status effectively neutralized the
reductive equation of bodily difference with social incompatibility.
The most obvious, and most regularly sustained, exception to this disparity
between the promise of republican values and the exclusion of the disabled
was provided by photographic representations of les mutilés de guerre
(disabled war veterans), the wholesale bombardment of which French
newspaper readers and newsreel viewers had become accustomed to in the
interwar years (see Figure 2). One news photograph, taken approximately
two years earlier in December 1934, depicts a demonstration by disabled
veterans of the First World War who are marching down the sidewalk of the
Champs-Élysées and waving French flags to attract the attention of pedestrians and automobile drivers. The powerful iconographic value of this
procession of middle-aged veterans moving slowly across cold, wet pavement
on canes and crutches, many sporting berets and decorations in deference to
their military service as well as mustaches often cultivated to conceal battle
scars, makes a dramatic visual contrast with the elegant, beaux arts shapes of
the storefront façades, apartment buildings, and shiny sedans that seem to be
moving, as if with teleological certainty, in an entirely different direction. This
is a markedly different strategy for representing disability than that used in
the photograph of Keller and Thomson. In early 20th-century France,
wounded veterans were seen as symbols of enormous personal sacrifice to
the nation-state, and as such occupied an esteemed position in the social
hierarchy of disability since their bodily difference was equated with tropes
of patriotic citizenship and domestic care giving (Panchasi, 1995; Sherman
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Serlin Disabling the Flâneur
Figure 2 Disabled veterans of the First World War demonstrating for
increased pensions and benefits on the avenue des Champs-Élysées, Paris.
Photograph taken December 1934. © Bettmann/Corbis. Reproduced with
permission.
1999). Furthermore, French war veterans with disabilities – the image of
which is crystallized by the amputee in the foreground perched resignedly on
crutches – were at the forefront of what might be called anachronistically a
disability rights movement, forming extensive networks of military fraternities
and mutual aid societies, demanding improved pension and health benefits
from the French government, and organizing protest marches on symbolic
(and tourist-heavy) thoroughfares like the Champs-Élysées (Prost, 1992).
Perhaps this is why, in the end, the photograph of Keller and Thomson
remains so striking. It presents a gendered alternative to displays of bodily
difference by forging connections between the public representation of
disability and its heretofore-unrealized corollaries in the realms of paparazzi,
fashion, and documentary photography that so characterized visual culture
in Paris during the 1930s. The image of Keller and Thomson challenges the
male-defined public culture of disability by invoking the kind of gendered
images of consumption and urban pleasure with which the French public
was well acquainted during the interwar years, including the New Woman,
the androgynous garçonne, and the single working girl (Chadwick and
Ladimer, 2003; Roberts, 1994; Stewart, 2001). Yet the photograph’s
deliberate blurring of the visual codes of window-shopping with the visual
codes of public disability also has the effect, intentional or otherwise, of
distinguishing Keller not only from disabled veterans but also from images of
women that, historically, saturated the French popular imagination. Indeed,
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the photograph depicting a blind woman window-shopping may have been
a point of ironic juxtaposition with the complex public iconography of the
Parisienne, the single girl-about-town who inhabited fin-de-siècle urban
culture as memorialized in the graphic poster art of Henri de ToulouseLautrec, which combined coquettish playfulness and robust sexuality two
decades before the emergence of the New Woman (Nesbit, 1992).
Rather than codifying – and, to some degree, essentializing – the differences
between the masculine terrain traversed by protesting veterans and the
feminine terrain traversed by Keller and Thomson, perhaps it would be more
productive to see the two women and the parade of men as independent
but dialectically linked actors within the complex and highly contested
epistemological terrain of urban modernity. In other words, how might we
make space for Helen Keller, veterans, and other disabled urbanites in the
voluminous literature on the flâneur?
Scholarship devoted to the enduring significance of flânerie, from its
historical origins in early 19th-century Paris to its most well-known iterations
by Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, and a host of writers and critics
throughout the 20th 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 (Baudelaire, 1972[1863]; Benjamin,
1978[1936]; Buck-Morss, 1991; Tester, 1994; White, 2001). Priscilla Parkhurst
Ferguson (1994), for instance, has argued that the flâneur is not a singular
urban type but a multivalent urban icon, developing from the lazy,
unproductive figure of the 1830s to the mid-century mock-artist to the
famously perambulating gadfly-about-town of the 1870s to the anachronistic
figure of urban modernity whose primary association with enclosed
shopping arcades Benjamin so lovingly delineated in writings that
overlapped chronologically with Keller’s appearance on the streets of Paris.
Such shifting tides of meaning across a century and a half track a constant
recalibration of the flâneur from aloof observation to conspicuous
consumption. The phenomenological inspiration derived from flânerie has
played a central component in genealogies of modern experience that can be
traced to late-19th-century urban visual spectacles such as window displays,
wax museums, and early cinema (Charney and Schwartz, 1996; Crary, 2001;
Friedberg, 1994; Schwartz, 1999). In all of these scholarly explorations,
however, there is a constant and, arguably, almost tacit commitment to the
normative elements of the flâneur’s physical experience – betrayed implicitly
by what some critics have rightly insisted as modernism’s tendency toward
ocularcentrism or the ‘hegemony of vision’ – that is not factored into
discussions of flânerie nor, for that matter, the codes of urban modernity that
are assumed to crystallize around certain kinds of acts (observing, shopping,
collecting) or sensorial experiences (listening, moving, gazing) associated
with the flâneur’s body (Levin, 1993). Despite its adoption within a range of
academic disciplines and theoretical approaches, scholars continue to
preserve the notion of the flâneur as a paradigmatic example of the modern
subject who takes the functions of his or her body for granted.
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Certainly, there are more nuanced exceptions to this paradigmatic approach
to flânerie. As early as 1841, for example, Louis Hart’s Le Physiologie du
flâneur implied that the flâneur’s foppish caprice carried all of the sexual
(and, often, homosexual) connotations of physical and social difference
found in 19th-century pseudoscientific tracts on physiognomy and
phrenology (Ferguson, 1994: 26). A century and a half later, in the 1980s and
1990s, feminist scholars in urban studies and visual culture studies carved
out space for the flâneuse in order to problematize the male privilege
implicit in discussions of flânerie and inscribe women’s place in the social
etiologies of 19th- and 20th-century urban modernity (Parsons, 2000;
Pollock, 1988; Wilson, 2001; Wolff, 1985). Yet even within such groundbreaking studies, making claims for the flâneur or the flâneuse as an agent
of modern experience already presumes that the codes of urban modernity
– what really counts as urban and/or modern – are organized around
narratives of normative able-bodiedness. The shopping adventures of Keller
and Thomson and the protest activities of disabled veterans on the streets of
Paris in the mid-1930s 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 flânerie to survive (Breckenridge and Vogler, 2001). If we
define modernity only through a recognizable set of compulsory able-bodied
acts such as walking, looking, and hearing, then we exclude a sizeable
proportion of the population, both in historical perspective as well as in
contemporary experience. In the literature on urban modernity, disabled
people – regarded by dominant discourses as tragic and dependent upon
paternalistic forms of care and attention – hardly ever get to drink absinthe,
let alone relish the opportunity to hold the crystal goblet.
Such limited interpretations of the urban subject clearly had little or no
lasting effect on Keller, a person who believed not only that one could
experience modernity through senses other than sight or hearing but that
one could appear modern, act modern, feel modern, and be modern without
relying upon any of the meanings attached to bodily difference as either
proscribed by her contemporaries or codified retrospectively by historians of
urban modernity. Keller, for one, did not think that she herself was excluded
from the boulevards of modernity. As she wrote in her diary, on the same day
that she posed for Le Soir, she and Thomson
went alone for a stroll . . . The air was soft, the moon was snowing its
loveliness upon the city. The traffic was at a low ebb. We went as far as
the Rue Royale, passing Maxim’s, looking in the shop windows which
are the undoing of unwary mortals, Polly noticing especially the jewelry,
rare antiques, and Lalique glass. Everywhere I recognized the odor
peculiar to Paris – perfumes, powders, wines, and tobacco agreeably
blended . . . This is the real Paris in winter, and the more I see of it the
better it pleases me . . . (Keller, 1938: 169)
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As any connoisseur of modernist literature will confirm, engagement with the
phenomenological world through smell, taste, and touch was deemed a
standard component of urban flânerie, enabling one to experience modern
cityscapes through senses other than sight and sound (Hammergren, 1994).
Anthony Vidler (1992) has argued that the august pronouncements of Le
Corbusier, the French avatar of modernist architecture during the early 20th
century who claimed that the disorderly and unhealthy body was an
analogue to the disorderly and unhealthy city, were merely products of
fantasy that held bodily difference and thus social difference in thrall. Yet
such fantasies have not prevented scholars from writing about the
experiences of the disabled in cities like Paris, when they are considered at
all, as examples of the perceived incommensurability between disorderly
bodies and rectilinear architectural experiments, Art Deco façades, or the
ironic pre-postmodern reveries of the flâneur. Keller’s pleasurable tactile
and olfactory sensations of the modern city help reconstitute elements of her
biography, especially for the ways in which touch and smell functioned in her
immediate environment and enabled her to negotiate geographical and
physical spaces as well as social and political ones (Feld, 2005; Fuss, 2004).1
Perhaps the willful exclusion of disabled bodies from the literature on
flânerie has something to do with how the embodied experience of disability
challenges and even thwarts cultural expectations of the firm division
between public and private spheres. Victor Burgin (1996) has written that:
The flâneur who turns the street into a living room commits an act of
transgression which reverses an established distinction between public
and private spaces . . . [and makes visible] the survival of precapitalist
social forms that had not yet succumbed to the modern segregation of
life into public and private zones. (p. 145)
Burgin’s observation echoes that of Benjamin, who wrote in 1936 that the
flâneur has a tendency to ‘turn the boulevard into an interieur’, and that
‘The street becomes a dwelling for the flâneur; he is as much at home among
the facades of houses as the citizen is in his four walls’ (Benjamin,
1978[1936]: 37). One could argue that this is precisely what the body of the
disabled flâneur does when it circulates or is visibly represented in public
spaces. The disabled flâneur visibly alters perceptions of public space by
exposing that which has typically pertained to the ‘interieur’ – visible bodily
differences as well as the invisible effects of institutionalization or, in more
contemporary circumstances, networks of care giving and mutual support –
to the outside world in ways that are anathema to narratives of modern
autonomy. The routine institutionalization of people with mental or physical
disabilities certainly contributed to the limitation of some disabled bodies in
public space, especially those regarded as social dangers, whereas different
categories of impairment may have been supported by different categories of
freedom. In the mid-1930s, the disabled body of the veteran was a highly
visible, and highly gendered, component of the French public sphere,
sustained by correlations between male bodily sacrifice and the impassioned
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defense of French civility under duress. In one account published in a French
journal for war veterans in 1917, for example, an officer riding on the Paris
metro observes a disabled ex-serviceman board the metro car. Noticing that
none of the passengers are willing to vacate their seats for the veteran, the
officer accosts a ‘young man of robust appearance’ and implores him, ‘Come
on, young civilian, give up your seat to this wounded man.’ The young man
tilts his hat deferentially to the officer and awkwardly replies, ‘Excuse me,
Captain, but I have lost a leg’ (Prost, 1992: 30).
The nuanced negotiations between private and public spheres that disabled
bodies endured in the 1930s took multiple forms, emboldened not only by
the sensorial experiences identified with urban modernity but through the
innovations of space–time compression identified as hallmarks of
technological modernity. As Rebecca Scales (2006) has written:
In 1928, just a few years after the first radio broadcast from the Eiffel
Tower, two new radio charities, Radio for the Blind and Wireless at the
Hospital, took up the task of distributing free radios to invalids and the
blind, with the goal of putting these ‘brave and poor people into
contact with exterior life’ and ending their ‘isolation’ in the private
sphere. (p. 2)
By 1939, Theodor Adorno recognized radio technology as making possible a
kind of aural flânerie, thereby identifying airspace as one in which virtually
all citizens could spatially perambulate and discover new narrative
experiences of modern life (Buck-Morss, 1985: 105). The disabled person
who emerges from isolation to ride across urban space via city streets,
underground trains, or radio waves inverts the perceived distinction between
private and public by using his or her private body as the crucible in which
he or she forges public identity, and thus challenges the presumption that
disability is the antithesis of modernism’s programmatic functionalism.
For scholars of modernism, the multiple urban subjectivities of the disabled
remain largely unintelligible because the dynamic textures of sensory and
psychic experience are too regularly subordinated to, and held captive by, the
valorized gaze of the flâneur. Even with the best of intentions, such a critical
predilection effectively naturalizes the presumptive link between modern
subjectivity and the privileges of the visual. One could argue that an
ocularcentric epistemology follows directly from the canonical work on
bodily difference provided by early- and mid-20th-century photographers,
such as August Sander and Weegee, who sought out both formal and
informal methods for documenting urban typologies (Serlin and Lerner,
1997). In French visual culture of the 1920s and 1930s, images of racial and
ethnic types, homeless men, itinerant families, and those with bodily
differences were regularly exploited by the camera and spanned a range of
both commercial products and avant-garde experiments, used to demonstrate either humanist narratives of endurance in the face of adversity or else,
in the case of the surrealists, used to explore the uncanny textures of the
urban unconscious (Walker, 2002). In this context, the image of Keller and
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Thomson window-shopping in late January 1937 represented both an epistemological challenge to the ocularcentric conventions of flânerie as well as a
distinct shift in the generic conventions used to depict bodily difference. For
some, the photograph may have suggested that the reveries associated with
conspicuous consumption could be no longer naturalized as the exclusive
purview of the able-bodied, and that such reveries might be indulged by
anyone, regardless of bodily difference, perhaps even by a famous blind
female tourist. The photograph confirms the presence of a disabled female
body that was not only capable of promenading openly on a famous Parisian
thoroughfare but one whose subjective experience as an autonomous
modern subject who derives pleasure from window-shopping had the
capacity to transform the meaning of disability in the popular imagination.
On the other hand, for some contemporary French viewers, the adventures
of les flâneuses americaines may have summoned quite a different set of
associations. On 6 February 1934, approximately three years before the
photograph of Keller and Thomson was taken, hundreds of far-right-wing
demonstrators took the same route down the Champs-Élysées and headed
directly for the place de la Concorde. The goal was not to window-shop but
to oust Prime Minister Édouard Daladier and his administration in a protest
action that sparked controversy about whether or not the nation was on the
verge of becoming, like Germany, Italy, and Spain, a dangerous fascist state.
Reactionaries even placed ‘disabled and bemedalled veterans’ from L’Union
nationale des combattants (war veterans’ union) at the front of the protest
march, suggesting the ways in which social conservatives have often
exploited for their own ends the body of the disabled veteran as a public
allegory of the nation-state (Prost, 1992: 41). The demonstrators clashed with
various factions of the organized and sympathetic left, including
communists, socialists, radicals, and industrial workers, who had come
together in overwhelming numbers against the forces of fascism both abroad
and at home. The ensuing physical altercation between the two sides
resulted in 12 deaths, dozens of wounded participants, and the burning of a
public bus down to its charred husk. Within a week, more than 150,000
demonstrators descended upon the streets, transforming Paris into ‘an arena
of lawlessness’ (Gruber, 1986: 4). The outrage and sustained political
agitation of the left following the place de la Concorde riot created a Front
Populaire (Popular Front) that continued to gain momentum until June
1936, when Léon Blum’s Popular Front party assumed control of the national
government and implemented bills for a 40-hour workweek, paid vacations,
and collective bargaining tools for the industrial labor force (Shorter and
Tilly, 1974: 127–37, 343–6).
The enduring stature accorded to organized protests and labor strikes in
French history ensures that one must not treat popular street activism or its
representations glibly or as mere window-dressing. Demonstrators like those
who participated in the 4 February riots rarely would be understood, if ever,
as contemporary incarnations of the flâneur in the cultural imaginary,
especially since flânerie is often described as a form of non-confrontational
modern experience free of gravitas, with the burden of explaining its
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significance as a political strategy falling on the shoulders of historians and
cultural critics. Yet one could argue that the distinction between the demonstrator and the flâneur necessarily collapses in the moment when disabled
citizens abandon their private isolation and join the modern urban
landscape, with all of its sensorial seductions and potential dangers, as public
bodies driven deliberately by the subjective power of bodily difference. In
most cases, the necessities of survival and the needs of ordinary life demand
that the disabled citizen enter the public realm to work (if he or she can find
work), to consume, and to participate unselfconsciously in la vie
quotidienne. But in other cases, like those of disabled veterans demonstrating – or, even more poignantly, being exploited by other demonstrators
– to accomplish specific political goals, such activities mark a significant
epistemological shift that does not define urban modernity by denying or
hiding bodily difference but one that, in fact, defines urban modernity by the
active presence of bodily difference. Such a shift signifies a particular strategy
of defamiliarizing the illusory distinctions customarily made between the
disabled and the modern through a process that Lennard Davis (2002) has
characterized as recognizing the ‘dismodern’ (pp. 30–2). After 1936, the
Popular Front movement accelerated the belief among ordinary citizens that
a welfare state was possible, one that could include the identification of
rights for workers, the poor, and the infirm with the entitlements of French
citizenship. Until its energies petered out in 1938, the Popular Front played
a crucial role in deepening these beliefs, even if the entitlements ultimately
won by French citizens during the postwar era have become increasingly
devalued by social and fiscal conservatives and remain inequitably distributed in the era of postcolonial diaspora and global immigration (Chafer and
Sackur, 1999; Jackson, 1990). Circulating a portrait of a disabled American
woman and her companion ambling down the avenue des Champs-Élysées
in 1937 was neither a mere function of paparazzi-driven reportage nor a
mere knowing nod to the gendered iconography of the flâneuse but a
complex cultural production distilled from a historical moment in which new
possibilities for representing disability overlapped with new possibilities for
imagining social and political transformation.
In an attempt to chart the relationship between disability and visual culture,
Rosemarie Garland Thomson (2002) has identified four ‘primary visual
rhetorics’ of disability: the wondrous, the sentimental, the exotic, and the
realistic, a taxonomic framework that, she argues, ‘complicates the often
restrictive notion of images as being either positive or negative, as communicating either the truth of disability or perpetuating some oppressive
stereotype’ (p. 58). Yet even useful analytical categories such as ‘sentimental’
and ‘realistic’ belie the salient need to historicize 20th-century photographic
representations of disability as products not only of visual modernity, which
they undoubtedly are, but also of the particular political, economic, and
cultural contexts from which they originally emerged. The variable and
interpretable ‘truth’ of the photograph of Keller and Thomson, or that of a
procession of disabled veterans, is intimately connected to the contested
categories of modernity – the evolution of modern subjectivities, the
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emergence of the modern nation-state, and the interstices between them ––
specific to French society during the first four decades of the 20th century.
Henri-Jacques Stiker (1997[1982]) has argued that, before the First World
War, ‘the disabled were exceptions and stood for exceptionality, alterity’. But
following the rise of rehabilitation and vocational training in the 1920s,
disabled veterans and their civilian counterparts were seen as ‘ordinary . . .
[and were] returned to ordinary life, to ordinary work’ to support the needs
of the industrial capitalism and the economic and political health of the state
(p. 128). Consequently, rhetorical appeals to and material images of la vie
quotidienne that circulated during the Popular Front period were neither
simple nor ordinary but were unstable signifiers that could be manipulated
to reinforce different and even conflicting ideological projects. The visual
commitment to ordinary life by period photographers such as Brässai, Henri
Cartier-Bresson, René Jacques, and André Kertész was an attempt to capture
images of la vie quotidienne in order to show elements of the ironic, the
erotic, and the lyrical within the landscape of urban modernity (Andrew and
Ungar, 2005; Golan, 1995). For working-class activists mobilized by the
Popular Front, certain representations of ordinary life could be used to
illustrate the needs of the working poor, the conditions of the socially
marginal, or, in the case of the protesting veterans, the proletarianization of
the disabled. For conservatives and right-wing activists who clung tenaciously
to the status quo, certain representations of ordinary life – including images
of the exploitation of war veterans as symbols of national sacrifice – could be
used visually to situate workers and veterans, like their colonial counterparts,
into normative circuits of production and consumption as well as traditional
expectations that correlated honor and duty to the nation with social
deference (Lebovics, 1992; Panchasi, 1995).
The emphasis on the ‘ordinary’ dimensions of disability, its putative interchangeability with other social or political identities that may have been
previously marginalized in an earlier era but which have been proclaimed
formally by republican discourses since the Second World War, has
dramatically shaped the ways in which disability is represented visually in the
contemporary French public sphere and elsewhere. A photograph taken at a
disability rights demonstration in Paris in December 2004, for example,
portrays activists raising their gloved hands to the colorless winter skies
above in a moment of mixed-gender, transgenerational solidarity (see Figure
3). Here, the move to make disability public takes the form of an urgent
street intervention as the demonstrators, most of whom use wheelchairs, are
shown seizing public space and actively protesting proposed limits to the
S.O.S. Attentats laws, which since 1986 have provided legal advocacy and
economic compensations for people disabled as a result of violent crimes,
terrorist attacks, and medical malpractice.2 The body language and facial
expressions of the activists seem to communicate that, since their status is
codified in law, social justice for the disabled is understood to be a given,
even if the wistful expression on the face of the young woman on the lower
left, clad in leather and poised to use her mobile, suggests a greater degree
of uncertainty than those of her colleagues.
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Serlin Disabling the Flâneur
Figure 3 Disabled activists on unknown street in Paris demonstrating
against proposed limits to the S.O.S. Attentats laws, which since 1986 have
provided legal protections for French citizens disabled by violent crimes,
terrorist attacks, and medical malpractice. Photograph taken 3 December
2004. © Jacky Naegelen/Reuters/Corbis. Reproduced with permission.
The photograph is intended to show a physical confrontation with the public
dimensions of disability in ways that, initially, seem to resonate with that of
the disabled veterans marching down the Champs-Élysées exactly 70 years
earlier in December 1934. Both images draw upon the visual rhetorics of
protest activity and street theatre that have been long embraced by French
political culture. Compensations for civilians may in fact be the logical
outgrowth of compensations for veterans and weighted, as we have seen in
the United States since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, with
rhetorical claims to certain forms of political normativity. Yet the
constellation of literal and metaphorical signs of modern disability rights that
appear in the 2004 photograph – from the professional placards, traffic
shapes, and adhesive stickers, all printed in safety orange, to the universal
icon for les handicapés, the gender-free stick figure of a wheelchair user,
visible in the immediate foreground – suggests the narrow limits, rather than
the wide possibilities, of visually representing certain public instantiations of
disability in the post-civil rights era (and, in France, since the Declaration des
droits des personnes handicapées was proclaimed in 1975). Unlike their
forbears, the activists pictured here already presume political rights as
citizens who are recognized by the law and as members of a social group
protected by the state. The tactile and olfactory sensations of modern
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experience invoked by the disabled flâneur, in other words, have been
supplanted by the fixed formulations of modern identity claimed by the
disabled activist, and thus have been rendered as pure nostalgia. Perhaps the
70-year-old photographs of the protesting veterans and of Keller and
Thomson, paired together, trace a visual genealogy of incipient disabled
citizenship in which the publicly circulated image of a blind flâneuse
navigating shop windows, feeling fabrics, and breathing in the urban delights
of Paris is precisely what veterans of the republic were marching to protect
in the first place. Recoding the possibilities of disabled experience – in the
streets, on the sidewalks, and in every public space between – as vital
components of urban modernity helps us understand these photographs in
ways that are both consonant with and departures from the familiar
representational rhetorics of disability.
Acknowledgements
Les plus chaleureux remerciements to Lisa Cartwright, Giovanna Chesler, Cathy
Kudlick, Etienne Pelaprat, Roddey Reid, Rebecca Scales, Sue Schweik, and Brian
Selznick for their insightful comments on early drafts; to Danielle Tcholakian for her
supple research skills; and to Lennard Davis and Marquard Smith for their
encouragement.
Notes
1. Some have argued that Keller’s claims to gender normativity as a modern woman
and, in her travels, as an urban flâneuse may have helped to defuse the
homoerotic energy associated with the tactile relationships she maintained with
other women (see Chinn, 2006; White, 2003).
2. For more about the S.O.S. Attentats laws, see [http://www.sos-attentats.org], last
accessed 3 October 2006.
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David Serlin is an Associate Professor of Communication and Science
Studies, and affiliated faculty in Critical Gender Studies, at the University of
California at San Diego. He is the author of Replaceable You: Engineering the
Body in Postwar America (2004), which was awarded the 2005 Alan Bray
Book Prize by the Modern Language Association; the coeditor of Artificial
Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics (2002); and the editor
of Imagining Illness: Public Health and Visual Culture (forthcoming). He is
currently working on a book-length project about disability, visuality, and
modern architecture.
Address: Department of Communication 0503, University of California at
San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0503, USA. [email:
[email protected]]
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