Why do people get naked in public? French law sees it as a form of sexual exhibition, but it is much more often the pleasure of a lifestyle, or a way of making demands, that expresses the exposure of the body.
How can nudity still be subversive, when naked bodies have become very commonplace in advertising and on television? It is with this astonishment that the book by Hubert Prolongeau, writer and journalist, opens, which he publishes after the success of his story of a “randonue” in The New Observer. “Nudiens”, “solidarnue”, “non-textiles”, many neologisms punctuate the book, where the reader discovers a whole vocabulary specific to the world of naturism and militant nudity, the first being a way of life, the second a means of protest action. This lexicon is reminiscent of the circulation of the neologism “manufestation” during the rallies, in 2012, against the increase in tuition fees in Quebec universities, during which students walked around partially naked. These events illustrate a more global movement: for several decades, the protest practice of getting naked has become widespread and internationalized in demonstrations. To what extent is posing or demonstrating naked a new form of activism? What legal and social norms govern these practices? What do they tell us about the evolution of the relationship to the body in our society?
The right to be naked
Interested in the right to nudity in public spaces, the author draws on his own experience as a naturist hiker to paint a portrait of his fellow hikers, thus illustrating the diversity of profiles and backgrounds. Reappropriation of their sick bodies or desire to reconnect with a certain form of freedom, the reasons and degrees of commitment to the naturist fight differ greatly. This choice of life, or simply of leisure, is however accompanied by frequent reminders of the law. Indeed, the “randonues” can end with the participants being arrested by the police, just like other practices displayed as militant, like movements for the right of women to bathe topless, such as the Tumultueuses or Free the Nipple. The protesters temporarily place themselves in a situation of nudity, or semi-nudity, in the hope of changing the rules of communal life governing public spaces.
These actions are also sometimes denounced by spectators — disturbed by what they consider to be immodesty. The debate crystallizes around the supposed link between nudity and sexuality, a correlation nevertheless rejected by the demonstrators. In a case reported by the author, the Association pour le Naturisme en Liberté (APNEL) is mobilizing to defend a hiker taken into custody for walking naked in the forest. She is contesting Article 222.32 of the Penal Code, which has differing interpretations. While nudists campaign for the desexualization of public nudity, the law considers it to be a form of sexual exhibition. Indeed, while it was the old Penal Code that introduced the notion of public modesty, the 1992 reform simply modernized the vocabulary, replacing modesty with sex. However, the law does not detail the conditions for sexual exhibition, it only establishes that a material element and a moral element must be combined, that is to say that a part of the body of a sexual nature must be revealed, and this with a sexual intention. But which areas of the body are considered sexually explicit? Is nudity claimed as a means of protest sexualized nudity? The priority question of constitutionality raised by the defense lawyer was dismissed.
While France remains the leading naturist destination in Europe, thanks in particular to its beaches and coastal areas benefiting from municipal decrees, the practice is prohibited in the rest of the country, particularly in cities. However, since August 2017, a free naturist area has been opened for testing in the Bois de Vincennes in Paris. The initiative has sparked many reactions and protests. However, the French capital is lagging behind other European countries, particularly Germany, where naturism is much more widely accepted.
But naturists are not the only ones to be arrested. Activists who use nudity for their actions, although foreign to the naturist cause, are experiencing similar legal proceedings, like Femen.
Nudity as a repertoire of collective action
Hubert Prolongeau is also interested in the naked body as an adjuvant, that is to say as a means of attracting the attention of the media and public authorities. It is no longer a question of claiming a right to nudity, but of using the unveiled body as a space of appeal. The body here is a communication tool, and not a subject of protest. Generally prepared and scripted, these actions are part of strategies for capturing attention, in order to be visible in a highly competitive media environment.
The use of nudity in the context of a protest discourse is a relatively recent practice in the West. Claude Guillon (2008) noted that the practice of subversive nudity developed in the late 1960s in pacifist and anarchist demonstrations, and became widespread in international summits from the 2000s. For his part, the author historically links this contemporary practice to the ” streaking », playful and festive nudity during collective gatherings, which appeared in the 1970s in England. However, he places the real starting point of protest nudity in a demonstration by Senegalese women in 1980. Noted by Francine Barthe-Deloizy in Geography of nuditythe event can be linked, according to Françoise Héritier, to ancient practices of breast denudation on the African continent, notably used in the anti-colonial struggle.
Environmentalist circles make frequent use of nudity. As Barthe-Deloizy notes: “The analogy between nudity and nature is more explicit here. The return to a lost harmony, the reconciliation between the human species and nature are the words conveyed by this protest nude” (2003, p. 133). Environmental activists communicate on the symbolism of the “wild state” and of the common belonging to the same Earth. Nudity, in this discourse, appears as a means of illustrating the fragility of the environment. The process is notably used by the North American artist Spencer Tunick, who produces gigantic performances bringing together several hundred naked participants (Bazin, 2016). In addition, certain movements related to ecology have made militant nudity the signature of their organization, notably animal rights movements, such as the People for Ethical Treatment of Animals.
Finally, nudity allows the staging of a power struggle, sometimes anticipated by the demonstrators, to accentuate the symbolic scope of their action. Faced with the police, the naked individual, at once harmless, innocent and demilitarized, would use his body as a shield defending and embodying his demands. This fact is particularly striking at Notre-Dame-des Landes where, in 2012, completely undressed activists opposed the over-equipped police.
The body-banner
Very often, the body is also used as a writing space in order to display the group’s demands. During a happening, it is given to be read. Flat surfaces are favored to facilitate readability, especially the torso, but also the back, the stomach or the buttocks. The limitation of the writing space induces brief formulas. Striking slogans, easy to memorize and immortalize by the journalists’ cameras, in the generally short time of the performance. In some cases, it is the bodies themselves that form the message by depicting letters on the ground.
Language becomes double: the naked body itself, a sign of protest through its incongruity, and what it writes or gives to read. This nude is not sexualized. It becomes the bearer of a story, an element of a fiction in which it immediately attributes to itself the role of the weak. It becomes a placard. (p. 83)
In France, this use of the body as a banner has been strongly marked for several years by Femen, a feminist movement of Ukrainian origin. Its members warn journalists of their actions and engage in photogenic performances: staging, bare chests, body posture, readability of slogans.
Power, standards and visibility
Militant nudity is part of a media strategy that is at the heart of current issues of visibility (Voirol, 2005). Hubert Prolongeau reports on this subject the case of a German woman campaigning for the improvement of living conditions for refugees in Berlin who, exasperated by the lack of interest of the journalists present, offered to undress. A journalist, lured, brought his photographer. The activist took the opportunity to denounce the sensationalism of the media by wearing a T-shirt on which one could read “Human rights not tits”. This example demonstrates the seductive power of the naked body with the media, which then borders on what could be described as voyeurism. In the same denunciatory perspective, a shopkeeper in Limoges, demonstrating against the opening of stores on Sunday, December 23, pulled down his pants to his feet while brandishing a banner: “How far will it take?!!” » Nudity is one of the possible strategies, without necessarily being effective, to capture media attention. As Serge Tisseron (2002) explains, “When you want to get a message across in the media, there are not many ways: kidnap your boss, blow up a building, commit suicide… or show yourself naked.”
Faced with the media’s interest in naked bodies, Hubert Prolongeau questions the possible exhaustion of this type of action in the years to come, their subversive charge diminishing with the multiplication of performances. But the answer to the persistent diktat of the spectacularization of bodies may lie in what we are given to see daily in the public space. If naked activists attract attention, it is also because their bodies are ordinary bodies, bodies that sweat, bodies with imperfections, folds, hair. They break with the smooth bodies of the small screen and advertising, whose homogeneity of representations we can only observe. Some bodies, deviant, on the margins of social norms, are indeed absent from the public space. Based on this opposition between visibility and invisibility, and in a process of resignification (Paveau, 2017), individuals carrying a stigma occupy the urban space from which they are excluded, to reaffirm their identity. This is the case of activists queer who reinvest the street “with ‘different’ naked bodies, subverting the dominant order, the one that oppresses ‘other’ voices and uncodified identities, playing with the symbols and codes of heterosexuality” (Hubert Prolongeau quoting Rachele Borghi, p. 79).
Halfway between an essay and a report, this book draws up a detailed inventory of the practices of militant nudity, illustrated by numerous examples and rich excerpts from interviews, and provides legal and philosophical insight into the social norms weighing on bodies in public spaces. As a journalist, however, it would have been interesting for the author to provide an introspective reflection on his profession, both on the media treatment of militant nudity and more broadly of bodies in struggle, with the ethical questions that this can raise, but also on the role of the media in the circulation of norms.