Lauren Elkin’s central question is: Can a woman be a flâneur? She is not the first to ask this question. Her book draws from a history of scholarship around the female flâneur, popularly driven by the work of Janet Wolff. But where Wolff and others succeed in making a case for this figure, Elkin does not.

Elkin’s introduction to flânerie begins with a study abroad trip to Paris in the 1990s. The young American takes to the city and eventually it becomes her home. In her reading, the flâneur is a masculine figure, privileged, and an icon of leisure. The city, which he mapped with his walks, was a playground, the spectacle for his spectatorship. Elkin soon begins to think critically about whether or not a woman could be a spectator. Her answer is, simply, yes. “To suggest that there couldn’t be a female version of the flâneur is to limit the ways women have interacted with the city to the ways men have interacted with the city,” she writes.

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The Jewish Museum’s new exhibition is based on Walter Benjamin’s enormous and uncompleted Arcades Project, also known as Passagenwerk, which he worked on from 1927 until his death in 1940. The show’s curator Jens Hoffmann has chosen artworks to match up with the lettered fragments of the Arcade Project’s “Convolutes” section—e.g., “T: Modes of Lighting,” “M: The Flâneur,” “K: The Commune.” As you enter, metal bars crowd over your head in a half-semblance of an actual structure.

The sequenced stations feature fine works by artists like Cindy Sherman, Timm Ulrichs, and Rodney Graham. The Sherman piece is matched up with “H: The Collector”: It shows the artist dressed up as a rich older lady in a high-necked sequin dress. There are some bits of Benjamin text up on the walls. Alongside the artwork and quotations are chopped-up texts by none other than the controversial poet Kenneth Goldsmith, adding yet more content to an already very full space. (In 2015, Goldsmith was widely condemned for a crass performance in which he read Michael Brown’s autopsy report aloud.)

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Though beset by its own theoretical problems (its upper middle class aesthetic, its exclusion of forced migrants), cosmopolitanism is the better model for the mobile subject. Like the flâneur, the cosmopolitan is defined by mobility. But in the cosmopolitan’s case, to be mobile means to absorb other cultural forms. The scholars Zlatko Skrbiš and Ian Woodward write that the “cosmopolitan identity is one that has been marked by encounters with difference.” The cosmopolitan thus exceeds Baudelaire’s narrow idea of flânerie. Cosmopolitans are not just receptive to other cultures, but seek to develop and exercise a sense of intercultural mastery.

In her book, Laing conceives of a kind of emotional cosmopolitanism. She is alone in New York City, where she has travelled for love, only to be dismissed by her lover. Overwhelmed by loneliness, Laing takes many walks. “So much of the pain of loneliness is to do with concealment,” she writes, “with feeling compelled to hide vulnerability, to tuck ugliness away, to cover up scars as if they were literally repulsive.” For Laing, there is nothing universal about being by oneself. It is as tailored to the individual as shame or desire.