occurs just after the autumn brought about by Eve's eating the apple, when 'the eyes

of them both were opened, and they understood that they were nude' (Genesis 3:7).
Reading intertextually the storyline of the rst fall of humankind through John
Milton's Paradise Lost, we can infer the shame brought about by nakedness
could not be disconnected from Adam and Eve's sensuality. The rst humans
were 'forfeit and enthralled / By sin to foul exorbitant desires' (Milton, 1966: 261,

lines 176--7). Milton makes clear that in his variant of the fall, the subjugation of
reason to sexual passion is the cause, allowing the blame to be put not only
on girl but on both the naked and sexual creatures.
as read from our modern vantage-point -- nakedness, as the exposure of the
genitals, cannot be disconnected from sexuality. The genitalia play a double part:
rst, they're culturally significant as the seat of procreation, following the
injunction to 'be fruitful, and multiply' (Genesis 1:28). The genitals of males must

(Deuteronomy 23:1). At exactly the same time, the exposure of the genitals is cause for
shame -- nakedness works in this tradition as euphemism for sexuality, particu-
larly for unlawful or impure sexuality. For example, 'The nakedness of thy father's
wife shalt thou not uncover: it is thy father's nakedness' (Leviticus 18:8). It'd
Seem the early proliferation of Judeo-Christian physiological ethos situated
nakedness when it comes to taboo codes of sexuality, and that this linkage advises
the contemporary sense of physical conduct, subjective performativity and the
Ethos of solitude.

Nakedness in contemporary culture is a solo relationship, or else it's sexual by virtue
of the presence of a gazing second party. For nakedness to occur on the list of gaze
of others without sexuality for the quite practical motives of bathing, changing
clothes, artistic representation, evaluations for purity or health, sporting events
or other practicalities, distinct bodies or circumstances have to be created which
Twentieth century
western culture authorizes specific websites of nakedness, some of which are osten-
sibly and explicitly linked with the sexual, others which are not. In https://nudebeach.cc/videos/i-saw-this-3-hippie-chicks-2149.html
considering the representability of contemporary nakedness, Elizabeth Grosz
(1998) provides a useful means of delineating the legitimacy of nakedness under
the gazes of others. She proposes 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/child or physician/patient, in which the lesser member of the
relationship allows a gazing at his or her body; (2) when the issues are lovers
or in other sorts of intimate sexual context; (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 physiological closeness, not where nakedness occurs,
but rather where nakedness is mechanically coupled with the desire, possibly even the impera-
It is in intimate and/or nurturing relationships that we
are encouraged not merely to look but also to show . . . (1998: 6)
While Grosz gives a useful account, I maintain that we might add a fourth
Type or context: those (physical) spaces in which nakedness is shared for
practical or pleasurable functions in manners which are ostensibly nonsexual: 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
These
Forms of spaces differ from those in Grosz's third category by virtue of their

(presumably) unrecorded status, their temporality, and the carefully constructed
codes by which conduct is policed in order to ensure that neither the expres-
sion of nakedness nor the gaze upon it is construed as sexual. Which is not to
Imply that such a relegation of the sexual or the lusty to an 'other' space is ever
Automatically powerful.
What such categorizations of nude/gazing legality start are methods of
viewing both the subjectication of the nude issue and the sexualization of the
naked theme in modern western postmodern cultures.
embodied performative theme, such as that promulgated by Judith Butler (1990),
the body is performed 'in accord' with highly ritualistic and stylized codes of
behaviour which bring the illusion of subjecthood. In the context of a parent--child