,
2: When Nature Calls (1995) and Powder (1995) being just a few examples from different music genres depicting nudity without ostensible or explicit sexual overtones. An important scene in Apt Pupil has Todd Bowden (Brad Renfro) showering naked among fellow secondary school pupils. Having been deluged with infor- mation from Nazi-in-hiding Kurt Dussander (Ian McKellan) on his experiences in sending Jews to the gas chambers -- under the guise of sending them to the showers -- Todd has a delusionary moment where the other showering pupils are viewed as starved and expiring incarcerated Jews. This is an evident and meaningful landscape in the lm, one which is ostensibly designed to indicate the Wounding effect of personal anecdotal and autobiographical records or stories of abuse, homicide and genocide. Nonetheless, several of the showering extras headed a lawsuit against director Bryan Singer and other crew members, claiming the naked shoot subjected them to 'sexual harassment, invasion of privacy, [and] bogus Incarceration [on the set]'. The essential element in the legal claim was that Singer 'appeared . . . to be a complete-edged homosexual' (Cheevers and http://wiki.piraatit.fi/index.php?title=Cindy-Gregorys-Letter-To-The-Board-Of-AANR--The-American-Association-For-Nude-Recreation-i , 1998). On the other hand, most of the plaintiffs' claims -- both legal and uttered during media interviews -- expressed the acute discomfort they believed being nude on set. As one plaintiff get it, 'there was smoke guys who had to stand on each side, and all they did was sit there and look at you while they are pouring their smoke. It's Essentially like all eyes are on you' (Cheevers and Ebner, 1998). The suit caused a media scandal, with several newspaper and television interviews being allowed the Youthful plaintiffs and their attorney, although the craze was came somewhat after several other extras disavowed the plaintiffs' claims. Cheevers and Ebner's article states that: 'Several individuals present on the set denied the crew eyed the boys in a sexual way' (Cheevers and Ebner, 1998), that's, they kept that the gaze was not a sexual gaze. What's interesting about this case is not merely the ways that the accusation the director and other crew members identied as homosexual is seen to collapse gay individuality into gay sexual behavior, but the wholesale collapse of nudity into sexuality. Among the essential plaintiffs made the following statement in a court record: I didn't want to be standing there for the world to see. . . . That to me is for me and my future wife to see, and for us only. That's not for the enjoyment of the homosexuals on the set.... I Do not like being oogled [sic]. ( http://embreveaqui.indisciplinar.com/index.php?title=several-more-times-Additionally--I-went-to-other-fkk-r and Ebner, 1998) For this additional, nakedness as gazed-upon belongs merely to Grosz's frame number two, the intimate or sexual circumstance, thereby disintegrating the contexts that protect the appearance of nakedness for the intent of showering, whether 'for Actual' or on the set of a lm. Where nakedness under the gaze of others is now more usually causing anxiety, tension, shame or even terror, it hits at the very solidity of the self as subject. If all subjective performativity is, as Butler (1990) reveals, a citation of the signier, then the instability of the signier of nakedness sabotages the psychic self as it truly is represented in and by culture. In other words, if nakedness can no More be discovered and delineated clearly in particular sites and under particu- lar gazes, then it risks destabilizing the performativity of the matter by intro- ducing an anxiety-causing encounter with unstable signiers. The instability of the frameworks sabotages the subject's sense of coherence and intelligibility, and the discomfort in nakedness can be seen to be a distress with the issue of what nakedness is for. Bathed in Sex -- Reading as the Pornographic In the various competing contextual spaces in which nakedness is performed legitimately, one involves a set of rite and institutional power structures of varying types, in which the empowered (and generally clothed) subject is Placed to perform a non-sexual gazing at an objectied nude body. This frame is most readily experienced in modern society by kids being bathed, dressed or supervised by parents, guardians or older siblings, or by patients being examined, prepared or operated on by physicians, surgeons and other medics. In the case of the child/parent relationship, we once again see a particu- lar cultural concern that such a relationship isn't always essentially non-sexual in the provisions of sexual given by contemporary culture. In 1995, a Visual Arts student at a Western Australian university was arrested and charged by police with 'indecently recording . . . a child under thirteen years by the taking of still pictures' (Bowles et al., 1998: 5). 4 The photos were depictions of her own nude sons, taken as part of a job in a photomedia degree. Although the images used classical poses -- a conventional motif used by such