Lecture 8 Nudity and Nature

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Lecture 8Nudity and Nature

• World Population Oct, 2009 6.7888 billion US
  Census Bureau
• Announcements
• ... ?
• CAUTION sensitive material in artifact
  with attendance sheet
• Thursday presentations begin also, email me
  if you need assistance in finding articles for
  paper.
• In October, we begin to focus on material
  aspects of gender, sex, sexuality, and nature
  consider bodies, among other things, materials
  on/in/through which gender, sexuality, and
  environmental ideals and practices intersect.
• Start reading A and S on Goffman on my Personal
  Webpage LINK, accessible through the homepage of
  the Department of Sociology and Criminology
• Closer to the final exam, The Smell of Burning
  Ants video will be show from 145 215 during
  class time following the regularly scheduled
  lecture.
• Office Hours Tuesdays 230-330 McNally 412
  OR by appointment daily email communication
• TodaySociology and Human Bodies
• SMUO Bell, D. and Holliday, R. (2000). Naked as
  nature intended. Body and Society, 6 (3/4),
  127-140.

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Why should sociology give voice to material
aspects of how we negotiate our bodies through
society? photos LIBERACE
www.reagleplayers.com GHANDI www.larrymulvehill.c
om

• To examine our interpretations of which materials
  we need and use, environmental sociologist
  Michael Bell draws from the work of
• Karl Marx
• Abraham Maslow

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Karl Marx (1818-1883)

• Our work all of it depends on interacting
  with and using nature in some way. Thats a fact
  of life.
• We have bodies We have needs.
• To meet those needs, we turn to the external
  world for materials to clothe, house, and feed
  ourselves.
• That external world is a sensual world that
  is, a world we can see, touch, hear, smell, and
  taste. things we sense
• How we gather the materials from that sensual
  world varies from culture to culture based on
  ideologies of need.
• (photo from www.philothek.de)

• Those cultural ideologies, based on need, dictate
  how we arrange ourselves and our economy around
  the natural environment.
• This means that we/society and the natural world
  are inextricably connected, having an enormous
  impact on our economic system because, after
  all, we need to buy stuff to meet our needs.
• This intimate arrangement means that we both
  suffer and enjoy the consequences of how we set
  up our ecological community.
• Historical Materialism Marxs methodology to
  examine how actions throughout history impact our
  past present actions an after-the-fact process
  which did not separate humans/societies from
  their past in order to understand where our ideas
  came/come from.
• History legacy of social activities.
• This led Marx to believe that our materialistic
  needs were 100 socially constructed AND that we
  arrange ourselves/society in ways we can be
  almost certain to have those needs met.

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Main critique of Marxist thought is it causal?
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Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)

• (photo from photobucket.com)
• Born in Brooklyn, NY, psychologist worked with
  monkeys, noted several striking similarities
  between them and human society for one some
  needs take precedence over others
• For example, sex is a weaker need
• than thirst and eating
• Heirarchy of Needs Pyramid
• (photo miracopa.edu)

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Maslow(though largely misinterpreted, and he
later re-articulated his theory)

• basic needs are at the base we need to
  somehow fulfill those before successfully going
  on to fulfill others
• We seek to fulfill those needs unconsciously
• Much criticism of this theory
• Most important criticism It does NOT address why
  we take more than we need!
• Three other important failings in the theory
• 1. Our needs and the ways we seek to meet them
  do not happen in a hierarchy
• 2. The theory is too materialistic-based without
  much devotion to ideals, such as pleasure.
• 3. The theory is thoroughly Western-ized (in its
  origin and its target audience) too much
  emphasis on civilization we seek fulfillment
  in many directions we, therefore, cannot
  generalize this to other cultures even within
  Canada.

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In sum, many sociologists accept that -

• Bodies are, among other things, materials
  through/on which ideals and practices are
  culturally influenced.
• Our material body requires environmental
  materials in order to survive entire societies
  are built from this need.
• Materials from our environments are embedded in
  our everyday/everynight lives in ways of which we
  are both conscious and unconscious.

• From an environmental sociological perspective,
  it is important to consider our bodies as
  materials in sociology in order to unpack new
  ecological dialogue on gender, sex, sexuality,
  and nature.
• Remember ideals, materials, and practices are
  not mutually exclusive
• Because ideas are powerful things, we will now
  turn our attention to how various ideals around
  gender, sex, and nature are physically
  represented in the social and natural worlds...
• Consider materials anything we sense or do with
  our bodies SEE, HEAR, TOUCH/FEEL, TASTE, or
  SMELL

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Bodies Environment Gender - an example of
this intersection

• The Eland Bull Dance Tribal females act like
  eland cows who are romancing each other and
  mating, dancing backward toward the huts where
  the (newly) menstruating girl lays under a cloak.
  She becomes a woman because of the dancing
  outside. (www.dhushara.com/paradoxhtm/culture/ela
  nd1.jpg)
• Compare this to mainstream western culture -
  is there a comparable event/rite of passage here
  to respond to a females bodily changes?

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a material artifact found in South
AfricaRock art on the ritual from about 3000
years ago in Fultons Cave, Lesotho

• 
  
  (homepages.uel.ac.uk)
• What might be around in 3000 years to teach
  those future societies about menstruation as it
  is today for many females?

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Not only do we have dominant ideals about
natural bodies, we constantly embed and
interpret nude bodies in society

• The Arts
• Myth
• Beauty
• Strength
• Eroticism
• Sexuality
• Taboo underground
• Religion
• Academic texts and popular press covers
• Health and medicine
• Federation of Canadian Nudists based in Ontario
  (FCN LINK CAUTION back nudity)
• Famous Photo of ???? (photographer Annie
  Leibovitz)

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Wherever there is culture, counterculture is
possible. Who might challenge this trailers
presence in their community? What are some
possible ideals of the counterculture?
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terminology

• What is a naturalist?
• (photo www.msn.com)
• What is a naturist?
• (photo www.bbc.co.uk/wiltshire )
• What is a nudist?
• (clothing is not optional during at least some
  part of the naturist performance)
• (photo images-cdn01.associatedcontent.com)
• Much overlap exists, and we take them for
  granted, but they differ.

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- What makes a definition official?

• Naturism / Nudism are defined by the INF
  (International Naturist Federation)

• Naturism is a lifestyle in harmony with nature,
  expressed through social nudity, and
  characterized by self-respect of people with
  different opinions and of the environment.
• Social nudity constitutes an essential
  characteristic of naturism, fully exploiting the
  beneficial effects of the sun, the air and water.
  
• Naturism restores the balance between physical
  and psychic dimensions, with leisure spent in a
  natural environment, through exercising the body,
  within the fundamental principles of hygiene and
  dietetics.
• Furthermore, Naturism fosters many activities by
  nurturing creativity.
• Complete nakedness is the "best-possible suit"
  to realise the return of humans to nature, and it
  surely is the most visible mark of naturism, even
  though it is not the only one.
• Nudity has a balancing effect on humans by
  reducing the tensions caused by the taboos and
  provocations of modern society, showing the way
  to a more simple, healthy, and humane way of
  living. (http//www.inf-fni
  .org/index_e.htm)

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ReadingBell, D. and Holliday, R. (2000). Naked
as nature intended. Body and Society, 6 (3/4),
127-140.

• Geography cultural norms affect how well we can
  negotiate our nudity in society and nature. For
  example, despite morality resistance, the nudist
  movement aligned with the liberating effects of
  the hippie movement in 1960s North America.
• In the early 1900s United Kingdom, as in North
  America, mass urbanization unfolded. This gave
  rise to a nostalgia toward the natural landscape
  many had left behind a leisure ideal.
• Many of those who had stayed behind considered
  themselves naturists involved in the
  back-to-the-land movement (vegetarianism, folk
  songs, handicrafts, communal living). But, their
  paradise collapsed as they suffered from the
  leisure ideal in that the city folk wanted to
  return to the countryside now and then.

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• IN GERMANY
• Hitler outlawed social nudity---it became a
  material/physical/concrete representation of
  deviance
• This affected more than 3,000,000 German people
• Prior to that, it had been practiced and/or
  tolerated by the German populous for the most
  part
• This new law marked the first significant
  division in where it was acceptable to be nude
  and where it was not out in nature, it was a
  natural thing, but in the city or suburbs, it was
  viewed as lewd and sexual.

• IN ENGLAND
• Around the same time Hitler outlawed social
  nudity, Englands eccentric writers and artists,
  who took part in nudity performances as a social
  fact, found themselves scorned by the morality
  squads of the day they were treated as vulgar,
  and were driven even further underground, such as
  the BlackThorns Sun Club which is going
  strong today.

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Ties between naturism/nudity and sexuality

• In England at the beginning to mid-1900s, the
  countryside was becoming re-Romanticized this
  included not only the landscape and beaches, but
  also the ideal of the humans who lived there ---
  rugged, naked, natural, animalistic which lent
  to an erotic ideal of the countryside.
• Sex in the outdoors had been correlated with
  social outcasts, particularly gay men, which was
  interpreted as eroticism within that leisure
  ideal of the countryside. Todays artifact a
  material representation of todays ideals.
• However Men now had an arena to be men, as part
  of a gay ideal and in direct response to the
  feminization of society and a growing sense of
  feminism in the air.
• In North America, men headed to the wilderness
  and wrote about it, such as Henry David Thoreaus
  Walden. They believed they were
  discovering/re-discovering their deep
  masculinity whereby becoming a man meant
  connecting intensely with nature through
  interaction rituals with the natural world around
  them. (Women stayed home with the kids!)

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All of this heated up the minds of the English
status quo Causing a moral panic of sorts
Spurring off intensified surveillance of queer
society

• Note the intersection of sexuality, bodies, and
  environment in that phenomenon
• We are constantly on guard against nudity and
  open displays of homosexuality, considering them
  deviant aspects of western ways of public life.

• Are you under surveillance? How are we on
  constant guard against public nudity in SMU
  culture?
• LINK SMU link to International Students Handbook
  on What to Wear
• In the early 1960s at SMU, there was a dress
  code. The students were expected to wear shirts
  and ties to class at all times
  (http//www.smu.ca/administration/archives/decade_
  1960.html).
• What are some other examples of moral panics
  around nudity?
• Is a naked body closer to nature?

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Next Class Readings

• SMUO Holmes, J.S. (2006). Bare bodies, beaches,
  and boundaries Abjected outsiders and
  rearticulation at the nude beach. Sexuality and
  Culture, 10 (4), 29-53.
• NET David H. Net Nude Crystal Crescent Beach,
  Halifax, Nova Scotia. www.netnude.com/main/info/ca
  nada/cyrst981.html