This article uses a photograph of the famous American blind advocate Helen Keller window-shopping in Paris during the late 1930s to meditate on and, ultimately, to challenge the scholarly literature that limits the way we understand the concept of the flâneur, the celebrated street-walker who has been an icon of urban modernity since the 19th century. The article re-evaluates narratives of urban modernity by suggesting that, in terms of charting genealogies of modern subjectivity, the sensorial and tactile experiences of disabled people should be included alongside the able-bodied privileges of the flâneur. The photograph of Keller is juxtaposed with the image of a group of disabled veterans to explore how the gendered dimensions of disability were deployed in French visual culture in the interwar period. The article closes with a meditation on the possible limits of representing disability in the contemporary French public sphere.
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