Aurosa Alison

In this essay, I do not want to focus on performativity as such and understand it as an aesthetic expression; instead, I would like to illustrate how performativity takes on the role consequential to an aesthetic experience. Specifically, I want to highlight how aesthetic experience takes place in the spatial contexts of the city. In this regard, I want to define the aesthetic-practical-sensory relationship of the soma, understood as a paradigm of a living body, that is, a body that moves and acts in space, by declining three historical moments that tell the story. I want to define three historical moments from the early twentieth century to the present through the soma-city relationship: 1) The first moment is inscribed in the emergence of the Baudelairian concept of the flâneur, a symbolic figure who introduces a relationship with the city characterized by a disenchanted gaze and a slow, wandering movement picked up, especially by Walter Benjamin in the Paris Passages; 2) The second moment is that of Situationism, in which Guy Debord introduces the concept of dérive, understood as an approach to the city marked by the experiential and emotional relationship; 3) The third and most recent moment concerns Richard Shusterman's embodiment of the somaesthetic exercise, in which the Avatar of the Man in Gold, enters into a relationship with the city, aspiring to reconnect urban spheres and not to a pure somaesthetic experience of the city. The last point to be made is that these three historical and aesthetic experience-based moments of the body in the city are marked by the body moving in space. In the case of the flâneur, the body wanders in an unresolved manner without a precise destination; in the case of the drift, the body is propelled by the many sensations and expressions of the city that are expressed through walking (urban Walkscapes); finally, in the case of the Man in Gold, there is a movement totally absorbed in the experience of places.

In this contribution, I discuss the potential inclusion of the third gender in future city projects. Drawing on Braidotti’s post-human context, which opens up new ways of reinterpreting the evolution of our species, I focus on the concept of ‘other’ understood as ‘extraterrestrial’. To do this, I use two structural paradigms: Richard Shusterman’s somaesthetics, in which body and gender are seen as identifying with each other, and the third gender, which allows the body to detach from its usual subjugation to gender. Paul B. Preciado’s book Can the Monster Speak?, published only one year ago, opened a conversation about the epistemological deconstruction of bodies. Preciado tells us that we “we are all in transition”, which means we must consider how to welcome others and adapt public and private spaces for a new way of being in the world. To propose a possible answer to the question of living, in particular, I refer to two case studies from the contemporary history of urban planning: the Vienna Women Work City and Petra Doan’s theory about the tyranny of gender in public spaces.