Neoliberalism Laid Bare: Feminism, Intersectionality, and Nude Protest in the 21st Century.

• Date: 01 January 2015
• Author: Bohrer, Ashley

In the eleventh century, an otherwise-unremarkable noblewoman from Coventry, known to history only by her title, became enshrined in history books and folklore. As legend has it, the venerable, god-fearing Lady mounted a horse (always white in the later versions) and rode stark naked through the streets. The public undress of Lady Godiva has captivated popular imagination for nearly a thousand years.

There are a few elements of the Lady Godiva story that merit further comment. First and foremost, as the legend has it, the Lady disrobed for social justice: outraged at the high taxes her husband, the 'grim' Lord Coventry, levied against the townsfolk, she pleaded repeatedly for the alleviation of the various tolls and duties. Lord Coventry, apparently after multiple pleading intercessions by his wife, agreed to abolish the duties on the surely outrageous condition that she ride naked through the streets. In the first place, then, Godiva viewed her naked body as a weapon, a weapon that could be deployed against a male-controlled financial power to protect a group of the poor, the exploited, and the powerless. As Phillip Carr-Gromm explains it, '[t]he power of the story lies in its alchemical nature, whereby she transforms the potential for humiliation into a moment of dignity and of pride ... A woman with no weapon to defend herself has used her naked body to triumph over injustice' (Carr-Gomm 2010: 96). Second, despite the taboo on public nudity, especially for a woman of her station, Godiva's actions are not reviled, but rather glorified. The violation of social bounds of acceptability in this case is lauded, and her name enshrined in the folklore of disobedience. Third, her protest is successful. All accounts of the Godiva myth end with Coventry rescinding the taxes. In the medieval popular imagination, the naked female form is powerful enough to achieve its political aim. Fourth, this tale gives rise not to one staple of European folklore, but two: Lady Godiva and Peeping Tom emerge as twin figures in this history. As later versions of the legend have it, during her infamous ride, Godiva requested--or, as some versions have it, insisted on pain of death--that the villagers remain in their houses and avert their eyes. All of the villagers except one complied: a tailor subsequently dubbed 'Peeping' Tom who, by the nineteenth century, was portrayed as 'a grotesque figure' at the yearly re-enactment of Godiva's ride (Reader 1826: 22). In many versions of the story, Peeping Tom is blinded by enraged townspeople, perhaps for his lewdness, but most likely for his betrayal.

Why might we revisit the ride of Lady Godiva in the twenty-first century? In recent years, nude protest has become an increasingly visible tactic in feminist protest culture. Unsurprisingly, this tactic has faced scrutiny from all sides. The moral majority of the self-righteous right wing has decried public female nudity as just one more indication of the loosening of moral purity driven by feminism's social parasitism. On the left, the criticisms have been more varied and more interesting, though frequently, just as problematic. I return to this moment of medieval mythology because it seems as though, in the contemporary analysis, left critics of nude protest are obsessed with the isomorphy between Lady Godiva and Peeping Tom: many argue that because nudity creates Peeping Toms, those who objectify the naked body rather than heed its message, 21st century Lady Godivas can never win, or at least can never win for feminism. As long as the female form is objectified, commodified, violated, brutalized, interpellated, critics argue, nudity can only ever feed the systematic oppression of women.

This paper seeks to examine this question and this critique by analysing nude protest from the perspective of the contemporary age of neoliberalism. In a world in which, as Nancy Fraser has argued, many positions and catchphrases of the feminist movement have been folded into the accumulative logic of neoliberal capitalism (Fraser 2013), the relationship between nudity, feminism, and objectification must be revisited. The co-optation of many aspects of the feminist movement bequeaths the urgency of reconceptualising both feminism as a movement and the tactics deployed to further it. And given the disproportionate effects of neoliberal programs of austerity, globalization, and structural adjustment on women of colour, any analysis of feminism under neoliberalism must foreground both the experiences and the resistances of women of colour. To this end, this paper asks the following questions: What does the neoliberal moment mean for contemporary feminist struggle? What does subjecting nude protest to an aesthetic analysis tell us about the pitfalls and possibilities of resistance? And crucially, what does intersectionality tell us about the world in which we consider these questions?

Nude protest: A concise global history in the era of neoliberalism

This section foregrounds the history of women of colour in the invention and appropriation of nude protest as a tactic. The media frenzy surrounding white women's nude and topless protests in recent years has obscured the vibrant history of this political mode of intervention, in particular of women in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and East Asia. By reframing the narrative of global nude protest, I hope to do two things: first, to challenge feminist criticisms of public nudity who proclaim that this tactic is the provenance only of conventionally attractive white women and second, to draw out the distinctive reasoning and rhetoric that protesters use to justify the tactic which, I will argue, differs significantly from its use in the US and Western Europe.

Nudity and the body politic

In 1992, a group of dispossessed farmworkers formed El Movimiento de los 400 Pueblos de Veracruz after a governor enclosed 12,000 hectares of land from 14 villages and arrested 300 farmworkers on trumped-up charges. As Victor Allen describes in his book on the movement, the group began protesting nude in Mexico City after a decade of largely fruitless demands for justice (Allen 2009). These protests lasted six years, with up to 600 activists disrobing, sometimes up to three times daily. After a brief hiatus, the group has resumed nude protests as of March 2014. One of the protesters described the necessity of disrobing in the following way: 'We are only peasants, we have no other arms, all we have are our bodies' (H&E Naturist 2007: 13). Another protester, Escobar, proclaims that by taking off their clothes, 'we reclaim a part of the state' (Acento Veintiuno Staff 2014). In their nude protest, the men and women of Veracruz draw out two key aspects of the power of nude protest: first, it is the weapon of those without weapons, dramatizing the power of the bodies of workers to the workings of capitalist neoliberalism, even in the absence of arms or other methods of force, and second, they declare that it is their bodies which make them a part of the state, that the state's interest in capitalist accumulation is constituted in and through the bodies of workers which, to borrow a phrase from French philosopher Jacques Ranciere (2004), constitutes them as 'the part which has no part'.

Nudity as defencelessness

In Venezuela in 2008, in order to protest the brutal repression against anti-government demonstrations that left 13 dead and over 1,700 wounded, 'people marched naked because that is how they feel: naked and defenceless in the face of agencies who are under the control of the government ...' (H&E Naturist 2014: 12). In so doing, Venezuelan protesters use the nakedness of the body to dramatize the defencelessness against a state apparatus of brutal repression; their bodies, made powerless by the militarized state, can become powerful as symbolic markers of the power they lack. The very thing which makes the protester vulnerable to violence--her body--becomes a site of power in the demand for accountability and the freedom of association.

In Cape Town in 2006, about 50 female inmates at Mthatha prison protested plans to move them 250 kilometres outside of the city where their families could not visit them (Die Burger 2006). The detainees used nude protest--setshwetla--in combination with hunger strike to demand an amelioration of their conditions. In April 2008, a group of mothers in Yarl's Wood immigration detention centre in Bedford, UK, an institution called an 'offense to liberty' and a 'shame to any civilised nation' by author Zadie Smith (Martinson 2014), removed their clothes when a pregnant Nigerian detainee was separated from her six-year-old and sent to solitary confinement in retaliation for an earlier protest against child detention policies. In both cases, incarcerated women used the only resource left to them--their own bodies--to protest inhumane and torturous conditions.

Nudity as care

In 2007, a group of Brazilian former oil workers stripped in front of the Petrobas headquarters in Rio de Janeiro to protest the company's pension policies. Similarly, 300 laid-off workers in Bangkok threatened to protest naked in front of the Government House if they did not receive compensation after being laid off from a garment factory. In 2008, the Malaysian Peoples' Reform Movement threatened to strip naked in front of a government building in Selangor after it increased the cost of low-income housing by nearly threefold. In these cases, and in others, the power of the naked body demands attention to the needs of that body--the care for all the aspects of that body that pensions, wages, and safe living conditions provide.

Nudity as attention

In March 2009, 100 female members of the Humanist Party demonstrated naked against nuclear weapons in Asnucion, Paraguay. Demonstrator Carola Gonzales explained the group's use of nudity: 'the public and the news media pay so much attention to breasts and bottoms' (Associated...