ASLI OZGEN-TUNCER Walking in Women’s Shoes Precarity and Feminist Pedestrian Acts in Cinema ABSTRACT This article traces feminist affinities across images of shoes as signifiers of women’s precarious mobilities on the screen. Inspired by Catherine Russell’s methodology of parallax historiography, it investigates compelling images of shoes in women’s activist filmmaking from two different time periods and national cinemas. The footwear of Eva from Lois Weber’s Shoes (1916) and Mona from Agne `s Varda’s Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond, 1985) lends itself to reflection on practices of feminist historiography and a figurative reconfiguration of the fla ˆneuse as a feminist historian who critically revisits knowledge of the past and of the present to set both in motion. KEYWORDS feminist film historiography, flaneuse, nomadism, shoes, walking The shoes always tell the story. —Ruta Sepetys, Salt to the Sea, 2017 1 “She was just walking home” reads a placard commemorating Sarah Everard, a young woman who was abducted and killed in London in March 2021 . 2 Underneath, the sign continues with “97 %,” the ratio of women in the UK who have experienced sexual harassment on the streets, according to a United Nations survey. 3 After Everard’s disappearance, a police expert spoke on television and admonished women to be aware of their surroundings when out. “Keep your headphones out [of your ears],” she said, and “keep looking over your shoulder,” since women walking the streets “can be more vulnerable” if they are “out and about late at night.” She followed that all up with the advisory that caused the most international uproar: “Make sure you’re wearing shoes that you can run away [in] if need be.” 4 But Everard was wearing running shoes. They did not help her. This advice was all unsettlingly familiar to women’s ears, as it repeated fallacies about gender-based violence, putting the responsibility—really the blame—on women’s shoulders. It is rarely men who are instructed to adjust 135 Feminist Media Histories, Vol. 7 , Number 3 , pps. 135 –153 . electronic ISSN: 2373 -7492  2021 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permis- sions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p¼reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10 .1525 / fmh. 2021 .7 .3 .135 http://online.ucpress.edu/fmh/article-pdf/7/3/135/470204/fmh.2021.7.3.135.pdf?casa_token=I6bY4fCH0HIAAAAA:kYyZcSyS24Euk8gN7hMlECBpnuGWYEsmTTRfaRUKxoWLgP92FCPQZ1cEw1g0xW0FB5Ff7RY by University of Amsterdam use