| Abstract: | Using the example of a fictional shopper from the early twentieth century, Bowlby looks at how the notion of mobility as characteristic of the modern subject intersects with notions of femininity and masculinity. Valéry Larbaud's ultramobile imaginary shopper is compared with Freud's portrait of the woman sadly fixed for all time in her character once she has reached the age of thirty. The concluding section looks at the way that mobility of identity has become a norm for both sexes in the last part of the century, making the very idea of a self into a kind of rational shopping, a 'choosing' of different identities. |
