The erotic dimension of the city has always been an aspect of its fearfulness, for it holds out the possibility that one will lose one’s identity, will fall. But we also take pleasure in being open to and interested in people we experience as different. We spend a Sunday afternoon walking through Chinatown, or checking out this week’s eccentric players in the park. We look for restaurants, stores, and clubs with something new for us, a new ethnic food, a different atmosphere, a different crowd of people. We walk through sections of the city that we experience as having unique characters which are not ours, where people from diverse places mingle and then go home.
–Iris Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (239), cited in Michaele Ferguson, Taming the Shrew? Choice Feminism and the Fear of Politics (22)
I like Ferguson’s article, which I came upon by chance, and I suspect I would like this book she cites as well. In the meanwhile I love the quotation, which explains very well why I like cities and also why people find this inappropriate me that I go to them on my own and that I enjoy living in them: it is erotic, you might lose your identity, you might fall.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 