Tales from the Body Public: Corporeal Citizenship and Appropriation of Public Space in Copenhagen 1900

English abstract: How can we approach the interaction between body and city as political? This article moves through a sequence of cases in which bodies - groups, crowds, or swarms of people - have affected the public space of Copenhagen around 1900. First, election day is investigated for its contradictory spectacle of the public egalitarian crowd and the singular subject of the secret ballot. The analysis then turns to political marches of the period, considering the way participants in these marches produced and appropriated their routes during the intensified political tensions of the 1880s and 1890s. The strange phenomenon of New Year riots at City Hall Square and the anarchist attack on the Stock Exchange, as the final examples, serve to show a pattern of bodily agency, on a scale from the least to the most contested crowdings. In this way, the article seeks to locate the body in the discussion of public space in cultural history that has for some time been focusing on materiality.