Urban Loving Strangers

I am interested in Tim Dean’s notion of cruising within a context of urban planning and the construction of a city/social way of life. Using Jane Jacob’s text, Dean constructs a re-negotiated site of urban modernity (relying also on Baudelaire and Whitman). In his examination of promiscuity, Dean begins his discussion surrounding the phrase “Why should strangers not be lovers?” This question resurfaces throughout his essay, opening up a terrain for further negotiating the possibility of the “Stranger” or “other” within the context of cruising as part of the fabric in urban safety and life.


Strangers make up cities (perhaps part of a modern/postmodern definition of a city?). Dean furthers this point by considering “erotic encounters” as a point or more specifically a “metaphor” in defining this notion of “otherness” (pg. 181). Thus, the pleasure of urban life or city life comes down to the principle of not only living next to and within a set of strangers, but also this possibility in contact (pleasure in contact). At this point in Dean’s argument, he goes on to reconstruct a personal example from his own life, meeting a homeless man on his way to the gym. He provides an interesting recollection of the encounter, noting the physical details of mapping and remapping a walk to a destination through a “short-cut” and social exchange between someone of an “other-ed” position. In a certain sense, it seems a bit indulgent to me (I don’t know if this is the right word here), but this example seems to fit so readily into Dean’s example of defining the “urban” poor as part of this invisibility in defining the stranger in urban life…I know this is digressing from this week’s topic, but Dean’s example made me think about the homeless man’s mapping of the city (after their departure from Gold’s Gym). Where did he go after this point? In a sense, the homeless man almost becomes this object of “otherness” that Dean is attempting to depart from…or perhaps, that is part of his point- this man becomes wrapped up into Dean’s understanding of the pleasures of contact.


This notion of urban mapping also connects very much to Leo Bersani’s “Sociability and Cruising” text. Bersani’s first line opens up with the idea of social composed of desire (pg. 9). I hope to discuss this text further in class (at least for my own personal understanding). One of the more striking lines comes near the conclusion of Bersani’s text, in his discussion of otherness. Bersani states, “The jouissance of otherness has as its pre-condition the stripping away of the self, a loss of all that gives us pleasure and pain in our negotiable exchanges with the world.” It is here where I think the center of both Dean and Bersani’s writings connect, opening up further discussion in regards to an urban-mapping of the other and carving out a human subject that can negotiate this inner/outer dynamic with the understanding of home and embodiment that re-configures the social stranger.