In 1968, members of the New York Radical Women\u2019s Group gathered in Atlantic City to protest the Miss America pageant and what they called the \u201cThe Degrading Mindless-Boob-Girlie Symbol.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - \u201cNo More Miss America!\u201d (1968) Reprinted in The Feminist eZine<\/em>. Accessed January 31, 2017. http:\/\/www.feministezine.com\/feminist\/modern\/No-More-Ms-America.html.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nThey passed out pamphlets that critiqued the commercial qualities of the beauty contest as a \u201cConsumer Con-Game.\u201d5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Ibid.<\/span> In a bid to highlight the tools of a policed femininity, they symbolically threw a series of products, including mops, Playboy <\/em>magazines, high heels, false lashes, hairspray, and bras, into a garbage can, which they then threatened to set alight. However, the local police intervened, deeming it a possible fire hazard. Even if no literal bra burning took place that day, the media blazed its own trail by scattering the headlines with verbal images of singed undergarments. A complex public protest on the objectification of women\u2019s bodies was once again recast to re-objectify those bodies. By challenging social standards of beauty, the protesters opened themselves up to the same old accusations of ugliness that had been lev\u00adelled at the suffragettes. If the suffragettes of the first wave had been labelled old, ugly, and monstrous, then activists of the second wave were similarly described as hairy-legged, \u201cstrident,\u201d and \u201cdouble-chinned\u201d in various publications.6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Deborah Rhode, \u201cMedia Images\/Feminist Issues,\u201d in Feminism Media and the Law<\/em>, ed. Martha A. Fineman and Martha T. McCluskey (New York: Oxford UP, 1997), 14.<\/span> \u201cBra burning\u201d headlines proliferated as semiotic teasers to evoke provocative images of unbound breasts. Despite its historical inaccuracy, the myth of 1960s bra burning still smoulders in the public imagination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\nFemen <\/strong>
Unveiling of Donald Trump waxwork, Museo de Cera, Madrid, January 17, 2017.
Photo : Facebook Femen Canada
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\nThese constitute two conspicuous examples from Anglo-American history of how women have been denuded of their activist skin in the public space: already, always, by default, sexualized and\/or objectified once they step out. \u201cWhen we act, and act politically,\u201d \u00adwrites Judith Butler, \u201cit is already within a set of norms that are acting upon us, and in ways that we cannot always know about.\u201d7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Judith Butler, \u201cPerformativity, Precarity, and Sexual Politics,\u201d AIBR. Revista de Antropolog\u00eda Iberoamericana <\/em>4, no. 3 (September\u200a\u2014\u200aDecember 2009): xi, accessed November 15, 2016, www.aibr.org\/antropologia\/04v03\/criticos\/040301b.pdf.<\/span> However and whenever women act within that space, they are inevitably being read within a set of norms that complicate the possibilities for action because they are embedded within visual precedent. Now, more than ever, the political sphere has become a spectacle dictated by the rules of visual culture. Does Femen attract the media because its protesters fit easily into a traditional exhibitionist role? Laura Mulvey\u2019s thoughts on cinematic looking, in which woman\u2019s presence as a sexual object \u201cfreez[es] the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation,\u201d might be appropriate to explaining the reception of nude protest within the media in a new post-truth politics of reality television.8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - Laura Mulvey, \u201cVisual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,\u201d in Visual and Other Pleasures<\/em> (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 1989), 19.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Is equality in looking relations possible or desirable? \u201cEquality,\u201d wrote Carla Lonzi in 1970, \u201cis an ideological attempt to subject woman even further.\u201d9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - Carla Lonzi, \u201cSputiamo su Hegel\u201d (1970) in Italian Thought. A Reader<\/em>, ed. Paola Bono and Sandra Kemp (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 41.<\/span> If the fight is one for equality, then, as she and others have seen it, it is a fight for permission to play someone else\u2019s game, by someone else\u2019s rules, and in someone else\u2019s language, with the inevitable result that you can never win. Today, this helps us understand the position of women outside of mainstream feminism, whose views challenge the dominant history of liberation movements in Europe and North America. The veil, often viewed in the West as a symbol of women\u2019s subjugation by men, has been described by artist Shirin Neshat as \u201can incredibly powerful icon in the way it empowers a woman sexually.\u201d This perspective, she says, has never been understood in the West.10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 10 <\/a> - \u201cShirin Neshat Interviewed by Arthur C. Danto,\u201d BOMB Magazine <\/em>73 (Fall 2000), accessed October 10, 2016, bombmagazine.org\/article\/2332\/shirin-neshat.<\/span> Whereas Femen fights for the right to be seen, Islamic women struggle to secure their right not<\/em> to be seen. Debates on the burkini point to a troublesome use of the term equality <\/em>that creates a Catch-22 in which, whether naked or veiled, women\u2019s bodies are pawns in political and cultural power struggles rather than sites of personal or private agency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Forty years after Carolee Schneemann\u2019s performance of Interior Scroll<\/em>, Femen\u2019s naked protests operate on a milder principle of shock and awe, but do they say anything new? Can the female nude make any political claims while remaining sexualized, unsavoury, unspeakable, or mysterious? It is an uncomfortable question that we cannot answer in a secular or scientific vacuum, because in the history of representation female bodies have long signified inside powerful religious and political dialectics of piety\/impiety and morality\/immorality. Three thousand years ago, the Book of Leviticus described the \u201cimpurity\u201d of female anatomy and its oozing holes. Lest we think this attitude dated, let us recall that during the 2016 U.S. election, then-candidate Donald Trump referenced \u201cblood coming out of her wherever\u201d to discredit a female journalist who dared to interrogate him about his treatment of women.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\nThe body necessarily remains central and universally relevant to feminist theory and activism.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nBreasts and uteri represent anatomical differences that have resulted in real, enduring inequalities of perception and behaviour. \u201cIf women are to develop autonomous modes of self-understanding and positions from which to challenge male knowledges and paradigms,\u201d writes Elizabeth Grosz, \u201cthe specific nature and integration (or lack of it) of the female body\u2026 its similarities to and differences from men\u2019s bodies\u2026 need to be articulated.\u201d11<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 11 <\/a> - Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies<\/em> (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 19.<\/span> Failures to openly acknowledge, eloquently articulate, and appropriately emphasize the physical differences between male and female bodies have had practical repercussions, including the systemic exclusion of women from medical research studies, a resultant general healthcare model based on the exigencies of male bodies, and the pathologizing of women\u2019s reproductive functions, leading to adverse medical outcomes. Although the United States often portrays itself as the leading nation of the free world, a woman living there is ten times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than a woman living in Belarus or Poland.12<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 12 <\/a> - Save the Children, State of the World\u2019s Mothers 2015<\/em> (Fairfield, CT: Save the Children, 2015), accessed August 22, 2015, http:\/\/www.savethechildren.org\/atf\/cf\/\u2009% 7B9def2ebe-10ae-432c-9bd0-df91d2eba74a\u2009% 7D\/SOWM_2015.PDF.<\/span> Notwithstanding the heated intellectual conflict that pitted Butler against Kristeva on the theoretical role of the maternal body within feminisms,13<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 13 <\/a> - See Judith Butler\u2019s critique of Kristeva in \u201cThe Body Politics of Julia Kristeva,\u201d in Hypatia<\/em> 3:3 (Winter 1989): 104\u200a\u2014\u200a118. For an analysis of the two sides of the debate see Erin Wunker, \u201cBanned Bodies, Spurned Speech: Butler, Kristeva, and the location of a \u2018maternal language\u2019\u201d in Tessera<\/em> 37\u200a\u2014\u200a38 (Fall 2005): 147\u200a\u2014\u200a159.<\/span> the physical reality of this function for women also remains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Within the field of new materialisms, feminists have recently argued that matter, materiality, and biology make their own demands. It is not only the disembodied historical abstraction of woman and her philosophical parity with man that must be at stake in the political sphere, but the highly embodied aspect of women\u2019s lived experience that must, to quote Butler, \u201cassert itself within the field of power and lay claim to what it requires.\u201d14<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 14 <\/a> - Judith Butler, \u201cNotes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly,\u201d Mary Flexner Lectures, Bryn Mawr College (November 7, 2011).<\/span> Although Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari all explore the position of the body as the site of the subject\u2019s social production, none do so, says Grosz, with respect to women\u2019s bodies. \u201cFreedom,\u201d she writes, might be reconceived not \u201cprimarily as a capacity of mind, but of body: it is linked to the body\u2019s capacity for movement.\u201d15<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 15 <\/a> - Elizabeth Grosz, \u201cFeminism, Materialism and Freedom,\u201d in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics<\/em>, ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 152.<\/span> Yet, when women activists descend into the public sphere of democratic politics to make such demands, they are still facing a conundrum that hinges on visibility and the historical signification of women\u2019s appearance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\nNational Women\u2019s Liberation Party<\/strong>
Atlantic City, September 7, 1968.
Photo : AP<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nBy targeting religion, dictatorship, and vaguely defined patriarchies rather than issues of reproductive agency, exploitation, or violence, Femen has, in my opinion, undermined the legitimacy of its endeavour. Its members have tied their objectified bodies to unrelated issues grounded not in the material claims of those bodies, but in subjective opinions and culturally based ethics. Before theory, the vast majority of women have specific material demands that are different to those of men. These material demands exist regardless of class or race, sexual orientation or desire, and despite culturally embedded beliefs about what such demands mean. They include the need for safe, easy access to contraception and abortion, facilitated systems of midwifery and non-hospital birth, legal safeguards against exploitation and violence, and healthy enfranchisement within the sex industry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Femen\u2019s questionable goals aside, its protests, like those of the Women\u2019s Freedom League and New York Radical Women, walk a line between titillation and revolution battling for occupied territory\u200a\u2014\u200athe female body itself\u200a\u2014\u200aoccupied not only by us but by a culturally embedded imaginary in which women are passive rather than active and belong in the private rather than the public realm. Germany\u2019s leading feminist, Emma Schwarzer, has called Femen creative and used the metaphor of a boomerang to describe the dangers of objectification as inherent to its project: \u201cFemen women are catching a boomerang in mid-air and throwing it back\u2026 they have to be careful that the boomerang doesn\u2019t fly back, and they become objectified.\u201d16<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 16 <\/a> - Quoted in Dialika Neufeld, \u201cThe Body Politic: Getting Naked to Change the World,\u201d Der Spiegel<\/em> (May 7, 2012), accessed August 20, 2015. http:\/\/www.spiegel.de\/international\/europe\/femen-activists-get-naked-to-raise-political-awareness-a-832028.html.<\/span> Yet the myth that we can guard against objectification, and the mere suggestion that women should somehow try to do so, reveals the inherently unlevel playing field on which the highly visual processes of politics continue to take place.<\/p>\n
![\"Femen-Madrid\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/90_DO01_Griffith_Femen-Madrid_.jpg\")
![\"MISS](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/90_DO01_Griffiths_NWLP_Miss_america_cattle_auction.jpg\")