The current Royal Academy’s major exhibition of nudes, wonders how to treat exposure of human nudity. Upon the request of the philosopher’s niece, Houdon sculpts 83 years old Voltaire naked, causing no scandal when it is placed by the steps of the Comédie Française, and later Rodin sculpts Balzac naked to symbolize his literary fecundity—creating an uproar. In this case, the association between male gender and subsumed femininity appears perhaps all too clearly, due to Balzac’s pregnant stomach, giving too much evidence to Beauvoir’s seminal remark that one gender (male) tends to represent and encompass the human species. The gender-verbal association has been extensively explored and re-paired by feminist theory (Butler, Irigaray, Bordo, Agacinski) often engaging psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan) and their idea that woman is a castrated wounded male.

But visual expressions of male nakedness introduce under-researched bodily pairs, such as Derrida who discovers his humanity (shamefully), while denuded in front of his female cat, somehow reaffirming and canceling the relevance of genitalia in this returned gaze, and the fantasy of being one of a kind familiar to artists, the member of a single original genre reversing genealogy and marginalizing sexuality.

What does the visual dimension of nakedness reveal about humanity? Or more modestly, what is the matter with male nakedness? Along with philosophical accounts of the body (Nietzsche, Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, J-L Nancy) the gaze of other human beings makes it an aspect of symbolic communication (Stevens 2001). Beyond commodification such as in advertisement (e.g., Zotos, Gray & Taylor 2018), this panel explores how “nude men” can be “bare but not exposed” (Natter & Leopold 2012) as cultural or personal symbols of selfhood, and how given media yield receivable genres of nudity (Lehman 2001). The three panelists suggest that male nudity expressing symbolic fecundity (creativity) or impending romantic marriage is received better than non-reproductive sexuality—even in its ascetic religious expressions. They also uncover how male naked bodies may resist dissemination even in widely-exposed films understood as media of duplication sensitive to contexts of public group viewership and commodification. Each offers some answers based on aesthetic configurations of male nakedness as they cut across genre, gender, (non-)sexualities and disciplines. One of the unexpected developments of this joint reflection concerns national and political investments in visualizing nudity.

Beginning with the famous Cubist’s alter-ego, the omnipresent Minotaur of Picasso’s production, recast by his mentee, Gertrude Stein, Carl Peters suggests that she perceives a death drive at the heart of a man-bull conflagration reminiscent of Spain’s bull fight, whereas the American expatriate “crowns herself the mother of us all”. Thereby, she breaches the self-contained children-devouring Minotaur into providing a free original descendant. Lehman speaks in this case of the fantasy of the cut genealogical tree limb. Of note, Picasso’s portrait of her reflects this terminal origin: “the only reproduction of me which is always I, for me” she wrote. Peters studies the vision of the portrait of the artist as a hybrid man-animal of composite “nudity” (and duality—“identity-entity”—“human nature-human mind”), and how Stein re-imagines Picasso’s personal mythology, adding to Cubism as the fusion of different cosmopolitan views.

Borrowing from the title of Naturalist Emile Zola (Fécondité), Carlos Gustavo Halaburdafocusses on the imperative of fecundity he sees as tied to this literary movement, “a novel that had a profound effect in the cultural history of reproductive sex in Latin America”. He contends it is reinterpreted as family melodrama in the writings of psychiatrists (Nordau, Lombroso). Naturalism and melodrama both permeate scientific writings recording abstinence, asceticism, and non-reproductive bodily pleasures either decentered from reproductive sites in one’s body, or detached from reproductive purposes—indeed preventing it. It appears that in this context, male nudity suggests either stable reproduction of the same (including generating the same regime in colonial context), or alternatively, singular unprotected surrender to all-consuming nature, perhaps in suicidal Masochism. The denuded male body opens to sites of erotic contestation specific to colonisation in a South American context. Halaburda shows evidence of an affirmation of what Foucault called bio-power or insistence on pleasures, including deprivations, rather than subject oneself to normative sexual control and refusing instrumental sexuality as part of labor production.

WilliamReginald Rampone reviews films from the late sixties (after the Hays’ code challenges) to 2003 with Bertolucci’s last film, and their incursions into male nudity, skinny-dipping, mixed-gendered threesomes, with a special interest in their treatment of the penis exposed to other men’s gaze, because they are comparatively rare, even in European cinema. He selects American, British and Italian films steeped in the sexual liberation movement, at the time when Italian film makers had to associate with American, French and British film industries. Rampone studies how pairs of male nudes include or segregate female participation, and how threesomes reassemble by pairs and singletons. He explores the treatment of the undressed male body in both film and print, straight and gay texts such as Flesh, A Room with a View, The Dreamers,and Love! Valour! Compassion!They mean differently given the reception contexts.Broad bodily experimentation in freedom to overcome barriers and limits toward fluid social points of social encounters that would transform the concept of body, of self and other individually and politically speaking.

Filmed male frontal nudity has become more frequent and main stream in European films (Stewart 1996) after the “sexplosion” of the 1970’s (Hofler 2014) that eventually exposed mainstream actors — De Niro and Depardieu in 1900. Rampone claims that the focus on male genitals in celluloid as political and sociological statements subsists, but it has changed media and scope and it eases into new open ended-models for masculinity that have the power to reflect or initiate societal changes. Unless Nancy is correct in his assessment that nudity is always skin deep and evading the conceptual, when skin itself is a type of clothing reminiscent of filmic bodysuits.

The organiser is the moderator. The papers will be read without interruption followed by a discussion that will be launched by the respondent (4 minutes) followed by a 15 minutes question period.