Paper short abstract:

This paper explores Emirati women’s flânerie in Dubai’s shopping malls as a multi-sensory experience. It investigates how the material and social environments of the mall evoke a range of affective responses among Emirati flâneuses, including pleasure, disgust, and a sense of belonging.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores Emirati women’s flânerie in Dubai’s shopping malls as a multi-sensory experience. It investigates how the material and social environments of the mall evoke various affective responses among Emirati flâneuses, including pleasure, disgust, and belonging.

The figure of the flâneur as idle stroller and passionate observer of modern city life remains valuable for studying urban sensations. While early analyses concentrated on the flâneur’s mobile gaze, the recent “sensual turn” in scholarship has challenged this predominant focus on vision. Aimee Boutin (2012) for example suggests to investigate flânerie as multi-sensory embodied experience rather than disengaged spectatorship.

Building on such insights from the field of sensory urbanism, my paper will first focus on Emirati flâneuses’ affective responses to the carefully arranged material assemblage of malls. I explore why Emirati women prefer the atmosphere of this aestheticized space over other walkscapes such as Dubai’s streets or traditional markets, and why they feel “at home” there. The second part investigates the “visceral micro-politics” (Pow 2017) of flânerie in the multicultural arena of Dubai’s malls. I show how Emirati women negotiate socio-spatial boundaries in encounters with mall users from different nationalities and socio-economic classes whose appearance, smell, noise or physical proximity are perceived as sensory excess. While such transgressions often cause discomfort and lead to calls for a stricter policing of sensory conduct, they also elicit curiosity and the thrill of glimpsing the city’s diversity in the safe microcosm of the shopping mall.