private (with private parts); therefore the strictures of circumstances which code and
constrain the ways in which naked is performed under the gaze of others. The
blurring between the limits of sexuality and nakedness, the encroachment
of signications belonging to 'sexually naked' contexts into sites of non-sexual
nudity, suggests an increasing cultural knowledge of the instabilities of context
and signication. While sex and sexuality have been discussed at such length in
the public sphere in recent decades in terms of the normal and unusual -- constantly
within special limitations, and informed nally by the ethnic injunction of the
hetero/homo binary and its variants and boundaries -- they have become banal
and dull topics, no longer websites for concern and ethnic hysteria or spec-
tacle. What replaces it as striking, subsequently, is not public nudity by any means, but
the struggle over signication under the breakdown of context. This challenge, as
I will go on to show, happens at the very private level, since nakedness per se has
been deemed an extremely personal matter, but at its most significant it relates to the
ways where the performative issue acts and behaves in relation to the gaze,
and the issues that happen when the rites that constrain both the body and
the gazer become unstable.
Showing and Showering --
confessional -- by virtue of the revelation of an 'inner' image of the body empty
of the signications of clothes and variously encoded otherwise in terms of
musculature, genitalia shapes and sizes, torsos and breasts, abilities, skin colour-
ing, tan or sun exposure and so on. As a result of the gaze and the versions on
the imaged body, this is a site of area -- the compulsion to create a body
that looks 'in accord' with specific codes and customs and acts in
Specific manners. And similarly it is the site of a disciplined gaze -- a gaze that is
Purportedly without interest in the sexual, a gaze that's performed as a glimpse, or
an affronting deficiency-of-interest, a peek or a non-prying glance.
It's no coincidence that the frame of the communal shower functions in
Link with disciplinary institutions for example schools, health clubs, sporting facili-
focus of examination cultivates not only the bodies on display and their aspects,
Skills and motions, but how the body in such a context is played out and
looked upon. Nakedness in the shower or locker room permits an extremity of
of clothes (wealth, status, group afliation, etc.). In this sense, then, the 'sort'
of nakedness -- non-sexual -- and the 'kind' of gazing that occurs is produced in
The Naked Issue
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and through the circumstance of the showers by rite and tradition. The sensual here
is relegated to other frames, and a transgression of the context results in penalize-
ment. In
follow titled 'The Apology' (1997) of the popular sitcom Seinfeld,
Kramer attempts to learn techniques to reduce his time showering by analyzing
-- and taking notes on -- guys showering at his local gym. When his comments are
mistakenly understood to indicate sexual gazing, he is assaulted, appearing in a
The irony here is that in being a website
which heavily polices against sexuality and the erotic gaze, it becomes a tremendously
sexual website, demanding additionally and more severe policing.
As notably, the site and its policing against sexuality is entwined in the
contemporary ethnic binary system of gender.
and distinct formations, communal showers which support gazing at the nude
Culturally, such websites are
Exceptionally 'guarded' from a transgressive invasion by sexes which have no legiti-
macy in that space. Dozens of 'teen sex' lms, like Revenge of the Nerds
college students, almost consistently for sensual purposes (of both the fratboys and of
the audience). As a means of keeping the shower site non-sexual, the separation
of genders works wholly in the conditions of Butler's 'heterosexual matrix' in which
the compulsory, illusional sequence of sex/gender/desire codes sexuality as the
natural desirous appeal only ever to the sex-which-one-is-not (Butler,
