ancient cities

all efforts to contain and sterilize, the gap between
the actual and the ideal remains within the image of
the “good” life. This gap is concentrated in particular
sites within the urban fabric, but it is distributed
throughout the body of the city; without it the
sanitary order of the city is impossible. As Peter
Stallybrass and Allon White suggest, we cannot
analyze the psychic domain without examining the
processes that connect the body, topography, and
the social formation. Thus, the sewer and other
contaminated sites open up the possibility of a psychoanalytic
approach to the built environment.
See also Rome, Italy; Urban Planning
Further Readings
Joshua Ben David Nichols
Agamben, Giorgio. 1995. Homo Sacer: Il potere sovrano
e la nuda vita (Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and
Bare Life). Torino, Italy: Giulio Einaudi.
Bataille, Georges. 1949. La Part maudite (The Accursed
Share). Vols. 1–3. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit.
Foucault, Michel. 1966. Les Mots et les choses (The
Order of Things). Paris: Gallimard.
———. 1969. L’Archéologie du Savoir (The Archaeology
of Knowledge). Paris: Gallimard.
Freud, Sigmund. 1920. Jenseits des Lustprinzips (Beyond
the Pleasure Principle). Leipzig, Germany:
Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag.
———. 1930. Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Civilization
and Its Discontent). Vienna, Austria: Internationaler
Psychoanalytischer Verlag
Hacking, Ian. 2004. Historical Ontology. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Lacan, Jacques. 1999. Écrits I–II. Paris: Seuil.
Laporte, Dominique. 1978. Histoire de la merde (History
of Shit). Paris: Christian Bourgois.
Menninghaus, Winfried. 1999. Ekel. Theorie und
Geschichte einer starken Empfindung (Disgust: Theory
and History of a Strong Sensation). Frankfurt,
Germany: Suhrkamp.
Pike, David. 2005. Subterranean Cities: The World
beneath Paris and London, 1800–1945. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press.
———. 2007. Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds
of Modern Urban Culture, 1800–2001. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press.
Reid, Donald. 2002. Paris Sewers and Sewermen:
Realities and Representations. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Sex and the City
Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White. 1986. The Politics
and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
Se x a n d t h e ci t y
697
Cities both constrain and enable diverse forms of
sexual pleasure. The links between sex and the
city have been theorized in relation to the sexual
lives of urban inhabitants and the erotic potential
of city landscapes. The majority of sexual relations
that take place in cities are heterosexual, and
yet much of the work that has explicitly addressed
urban sexual life has focused on lesbian and gay
lives, sex work, and other “deviant” sexual practices.
This entry charts how certain forms of sexuality
and certain urban spaces in a minority of
cities have come to dominate debates about urban
sexualities. It concludes by considering how these
debates might be extended by attending to a wider
range of urban sites in cities around the world.
Eroticized Space
Cities have been vilified as morally dubious places of
iniquity for much of human history. The great wave
of European and North American urbanization that
followed the Industrial Revolution disrupted older
forms of kinship and family life as people migrated
to cities in search of work, lived in new forms of
dwellings, and adjusted their quotidian lives to the
clock-time of industrial modernity. These new forms
of urban life and the anonymity and freedom
afforded by large, concentrated populations enabled
unorthodox sexual practices and the development of
new subcultures based around minority sexualities.
In this way, cities themselves have become eroticized—there
is the possibility of sexual adventure to
be found in the circulation of the crowd, the comingling
of different classes in public space, and the
spectacle of the electrified city at night.
Initially identified by the poet Baudelaire on the
streets of fin de siècle Paris, the flâneur, or gentlemanly
stroller, has become emblematic of the erotic
tensions underpinning the enjoyment of urban life.
The nineteenth-century flâneur strolled the streets
of Paris, idly observing the city and its inhabitants
and engaging his senses with all of the pleasures the