Writing the Naked Body: Sex and Nudity in Nuala Ní Chonchuír’s Nude

Abstract

Introduction John Berger says about the female nude in painting: "She is not naked as she is. She is naked as the spectator sees her" (1972: 50). Berger's work directly addresses the differences between nakedness and nudity, especially when connected with voyeurism, and was one of the first efforts to bring awareness to the phenomenon of objectification--i.e. treating a subject as an object--of women in art. Sexual objectification has been analysed repeatedly from different perspectives, but probably the feminist approach remains the more interesting, even despite the high level of diversity and occasional confrontations deriving from each analysis within the feminist methodological paradigm. Laura Mulvey also established a cornerstone in the critical analysis of the male gaze and objectification of women in Hollywood's classic cinema with her 1975 essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema". (1) A couple of decades later, Martha Nussbaum (1995) defined the basic ingredients in the production of objectification in her analysis of texts by several authors, ranging from D.H. Lawrence to James Joyce or Henry James. Nussbaum cited seven key factors or notions for a process of objectification to be complete: "instrumentality", "denial of autonomy", "inertness", "fungibility", "violability", "ownership", and "denial of subjectivity" (1995: 257). In between Mulvey's and Nussbaum's essays other feminists released their own analyses of objectification in contemporary cultural manifestations. This was the case of Andrea Dworkin and her book Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1979), or Catherine Mackinnon's Pornography and Civil Rights: A New Day for Women's Equality (1988), written in collaboration with Dworkin. The topic I would like to focus on in this essay, however, is not so much pornography as objectification and the way(s) in which the latter is connected to the representation of nudity, as exemplified in Nuala Ni Chonchuir's (2) collection of short stories Nude (2009). (3) Far from shying away from such a delicate subject-matter, Ni Chonchuir boldly explores the possibilities of representing/narrating the naked body (both male and female), in tight connection with a preference for the sexual reading of the body as it is gazed upon by a far from innocent gendered "gaze". It is precisely this particular way of depicting and interpreting the naked body that interests me, for both sexual objectification and the (fe)male gaze are combined in Nude to produce a piece of literature that unexpectedly reverses the orthodox normative dichotomies concerning nudity and at the same time blurs gender differences between male and female "ways of seeing". Can we, therefore, identify a 'genuine' non-objectifying gaze in Ni Chonchuir's stories? Probably the best way to find an answer to this question would be to briefly examine some aspects of both (sexual) objectification and the male gaze, in order to reach some insight for the analysis of these evasive stories. The Sexualized Gaze: Objectified Bodies Much has been written about the 'male gaze' as regards the process of objectification of women--especially regarding the representation of women in cinema. Although the work I intend to analyse is a literary piece and not a film, the theoretical framework on the 'male gaze' may prove useful for the purposes of my research: thus, it is my contention that Ni Chonchuir plays with the representation of the naked body in an ambiguous way in order to bring out a heteronormative discriminatory approach found both in literature and in the visual arts. By so doing she manages to turn conventional assumptions around nudity and nakedness into a scenario filled with dysfunction, consequently establishing a new ground for a non-normative--and non-discriminatory--representation of both women and men. Laura Mulvey and John Berger, as has already been stated, devoted some of their finest reflections to explain the way in which women are objectified in Hollywood cinema and in European visual arts, respectively. …