The ethnic flâneuse: The Right to the City and Embodied Streets in Julia Savarese’s The Weak and the Strong (1952) and Marion Benasutti’s No Steady Job for Papa (1966)

Abstract

Drawing on Edward W. Soja’s radical critique to the prevailing narrative of history in social theory, this paper investigates how two novels on Italian/American ethnic identity are distinctively spatialized. The analysis focuses on the characters’ different experiences and perceptions of space, which attest to the interplay of identity and spatial production, paying attention to agency and spatial stories that are specifically localized. By using theory on the (re)production of space, this paper analyzes how urban representational and material patterns relate to social division, in terms of ethnicity and gender, and how the perpetuation of inequality is spatially enacted. Particularly, it examines the key gendered urban layout that is revealed in how women are often “in transit” (Gómez-Reus and Glifford 2013), “out of place” (McDowell 1997) or in fear (Valentine 1989; Pain 2001) in the “embodied spaces” of the streets (Tonkiss 2005). Through two texts of early Italian/American fiction, this paper addresses the spatial practices, as well as restrictions, of the embodied racialized and gendered subject. To this end, the figure of the ethnic flâneuse (Carrera-Suárez 2015) represents a suitable object of study on embodied spatiality which serves to subvert traditional intersectional constraints of spatial design and discourse.