Wandering Shanghai’s “closely woven wrinkles and veins”: the city through the eyes of an all-female poetry collective

This study examines the ways in which the city of Shanghai is portrayed and reshaped in the verses of a collective of seven women poets born in the 1990s. Founded in Shanghai in 2016, the group known as Chengshi manyouzhe 城市漫游者 (The Flâneuses) focuses on contemporary urban life from women’s perspective. Calling themselves flâneuses, they reinterpret Baudelaire’s flâneur and defy imposed masculinist norms by writing about the city they wander both practically and symbolically, thus claiming urban and literary space through creative and practical actions, opposing traditional male gaze. To understand how their poetry turns the urban environment into a site of women’s realization, and how the city of Shanghai is described and experienced, I will first introduce the flâneuse, the woman walking the streets in syntony with the creative potential of the city, and the flânerie, as an ideal, artistic and living practice; after this brief presentation, I will discuss some significant poems from the collective’s vast corpus, found online and in print. Employing close reading techniques, I will analyze those verses that portray the metropolis herself (for Shanghai is female according to the group) through post-modernity typical tropes such as the non-places as defined by the sociologist Marc Augé (1992), in an in-depth reflection on Chinese social reality in this accelerating century (jiasu de shiji 加速的世纪), during which slowing down and writing poetry serve as forms of resistance.