Des(a)nude my Body. An Ethnographic Essay on the Social Practice of the Nude and its Relation to the Male Gaze

Abstract

Sending pornographic images through social networks is one of the most common experiences among digital natives, and terms such as nude or pack are part of the digital slang. Nudes are closely related to the question of gender, since they are seen as a sexualisation of the ritualisation associated with female socialisation, as well as the habitual circulation of nudes on male networks. However, analyses of the nude tend to avoid a central issue: the male gaze, both individual and collective. Therefore, through a line of argument based on a literature review and a series of semi-structured interviews with cis-sapphic women, we will try to account for the implication between the male gaze and the so-called nudes, as well as the function of such nudes as one of the fundamental axes in the bodily experience of these cis-women. To this end, in the first section, we will critique the monopoly of machinic surveillance in Anglo-Saxon digital studies by pointing out a form of surveillance of the digital ecosystem that has been little studied: the embodied surveillance of the male gaze. Subsequently, the relationship between this male gaze and the constitution of nudity in semi-private networks will be studied, starting with Laura Mulvey's film studies. Finally, recovering the aforementioned theoretical line, we will make a comparative approach to several participants regarding their bodily experience. In the light of Goffman's social interactionist perspective and various social studies such as the anthropology of the body, we will try to understand how the male gaze is constructed in the bodies of the interviewees, as well as their experiential contrast on the margins of this "gaze" within relationships outside heteronormativity.