of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked’ (Genesis 3:7).
Reading intertextually the story of the rst fall of humankind through John
Milton’s Paradise Lost, we can infer that the shame brought about by nakedness
could not be disconnected from Adam and Eve’s sensuality. The rst individuals
were ‘forfeit and enthralled / By sin to foul exorbitant desires’ (Milton, 1966: 261,
lines 176–7). Milton makes clear that in his version of the fall, the subjugation of
reason to sexual passion is the cause, permitting the blame to be placed not only
on woman but on both the nude and sexual creatures. In the biblical tradition —
as read from our contemporary vantage point — nakedness, as the exposure of the
genitals, cannot be disconnected from sexuality. The genitalia play a double function:
rst, they are culturally significant as the seat of procreation, following the
injunction to ‘be fruitful, and multiply’ (Genesis 1:28). The genitals of males must
remain intact and unblemished, for ‘He that is wounded in the stones, or hath his
privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord’
(Deuteronomy 23:1). At precisely the same time, the exposure of the genitals is cause for
shame — nakedness functions in this tradition as euphemism for sexuality, particu-
larly for illicit or impure sexuality. For instance, ‘The nakedness of thy father’s
wife shalt thou not uncover: it is thy father’s nakedness’ (Leviticus 18:8). It would
appear the early proliferation of Judeo Christian bodily ethics situated
nakedness when it comes to banned codes of sexuality, and that this linkage tells
the current awareness of bodily conduct, subjective performativity and the
Ethos of privacy.
Nakedness in contemporary culture is a solo affair, or else it really is sexual by virtue
of the existence of a gazing second party. For nakedness to occur on the list of gaze
of others without sexuality for the really practical reasons of bathing, altering
clothes, artistic portrayal, examinations for purity or health, sporting events
or other practicalities, discrete frames or contexts need to be created which
Enable the signication of that nakedness to elude sexuality. Twentieth-century
western culture authorizes particular sites of nakedness, Before I begin writing anything else and before I of which are osten-
sibly and explicitly linked with the sexual, others which are not. In a simple article
considering the representability of contemporary nakedness, Elizabeth Grosz
(1998) provides a useful means of delineating the legality of nakedness under
the gazes of others. She suggests three bodies or circumstances in which a naked body
is legitimately gazed at by others: (1) within the context of power relationships
such as parent/kid or doctor/patient, in which the lesser member of the
relationship allows a gazing at his or her body; (2) when the matters are lovers
or in other sorts of close sexual circumstance; (3) when ‘we are mediated in a
relationship to nudity through representations — in art, in pornography, in adver-
tising, in medicine, in cinematic and ctional circumstances and so on’ (1998: 6).
For Grosz, these:
… three contexts are the privileged spaces of bodily intimacy, not where nakedness takes place,
but rather where nakedness is automatically coupled with the want, maybe even the impera-
tive, to look and with the leisure of looking. It really is in intimate and/or nurturing relations that we
are motivated not only to look but also to show . . . (1998: 6)
While Grosz gives a useful report, I state that we might add a fourth
category or context: those (physical) spaces in which nakedness is shared for
practical or pleasurable functions in ways which are ostensibly non-sexual: the
Locker room showers, streaking as a cultural theatrics of transgression, perform-
ance street art, the clothing-optional beach which is set apart from the ‘cloth
Plage’ by a sign, or screened from the highway by shrubbery and dunes. These
sorts of spaces differ from those in Grosz’s third class by virtue of their
(presumably) unrecorded status, their temporality, and the carefully assembled
codes by which behaviour is policed in order to ensure that neither the expres-
sion of nakedness nor the gaze upon it’s construed as sexual. Which is not to
Imply that such a relegation of the sexual or My first nude experience was when I was younger and very much by accident. I went to a beach with a lengthy shoreline on the more remote end. to an ‘other’ space is ever
necessarily successful.
What such categorizations of nude/gazing legality start are methods of
Seeing both the subjectication of the nude subject and the sexualization of the
Nude theme in contemporary western postmodern cultures. In a theory of the
embodied performative matter, such as that promulgated by Judith Butler (1990),
the body is performed ‘in treaty’ with highly ritualistic and stylized codes of
Conduct which add the illusion of subjecthood. In the context of a parent–child
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