Gendered places: Place, performativity and flânerie in the City of London

This paper is concerned with the relationship between gender performativity and organizational place, taking the City of London as the focus for the empirical research, and extending a Lefebvrian understanding of space through the practice of flânerie. The paper explores how the City is imagined, constructed and experienced in and through gender performativity. This is explored with reference to fieldwork including photographic and interview data, as well as through an embodied, immersive methodology based on the observational tradition of flânerie, showing how this can help to both sense and make sense of organizational place, particularly in terms of how such places can compel feelings of belonging or non-belonging. The research looks beyond the spatial configuration of a single organization to encompass the wider geographical location of multiple organizations, in this case the City. The analysis highlights the interplay between two dominant forms of masculinity, emphasizing how the setting both reflects and affects this interplay. In this way the paper contributes to scholarship on organizational place and the placing of gender performativity, and extends Lefebvre’s theories of space as socially produced by (re)producing the City through peripatetic practice based on the tradition of the flậneur.