P&P Live! Women Write the City: A Conversation with Lauren Elkin and Leslie Kern

In Feminist City, through history, personal experience and popular culture Leslie Kern exposes what is hidden in plain sight: the social inequalities built into our cities, homes, and neighborhoods. Kern offers an alternative vision of the feminist city. Taking on fear, motherhood, friendship, activism, and the joys and perils of being alone, Kern maps the city from new vantage points, laying out an intersectional feminist approach to urban histories and proposes that the city is perhaps also our best hope for shaping a new urban future.

Leslie Kern is an associate professor of geography and environment and director of women's and gender studies at Mount Allison University. She is the author of Sex and the Revitalized City: Gender, Condominium Development, and Urban Citizenship.

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Part cultural meander, part memoir, Lauren Elkin's Flâneuse takes us on a distinctly cosmopolitan jaunt that begins in New York, where Elkin grew up, and transports us to Paris via Venice, Tokyo, and London, all cities in which she's lived. We are shown the paths beaten by such flâneuses as the cross-dressing nineteenth-century novelist George Sand, the Parisian artist Sophie Calle, the wartime correspondent Martha Gellhorn, and the writer Jean Rhys. With tenacity and insight, Elkin creates a mosaic of what urban settings have meant to women, charting through literature, art, history, and film the sometimes exhilarating, sometimes fraught relationship that women have with the metropolis.

Lauren Elkin is the author of Flâneuse: Women Walk the City (FSG), which was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel award for the art of the essay, and a New York Times Notable Book of 2017. Her next books are 91/92: a diary of a year on the bus (Semiotext(e), Fall 2021) and Art Monsters: On Beauty and Excess (forthcoming, FSG). Her essays have appeared in wide range of publications, including the New York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books, the Guardian, and Harper's, and she is a contributing editor at The White Review. She lives in Paris and Liverpool.

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