‘A pair of buttocks’ that everybody hates

This article explores radical rudeness, a resistance strategy of deliberate rudeness to disrupt normative structures. Using the Uganda activist Dr Stella Nyanzi as a case study, I examine how women experiencing extreme structural marginalisation and systemic violence use radical rudeness in a nonlinguistic form (defiant disrobing) to speak back to power. Drawing from Black feminist theories of rage, I argue that radical rudeness is an instance of rage, not as a pernicious emotion, but as a legitimate strategy against patriarchy and dictatorial authoritarianism. I argue that Dr Stella Nyanzi’s naked protest utilises three intersecting forms of power – biopower, symbolic power and cosmological power – to resist the authoritarian Ugandan regime, turning her naked body into a powerful weapon of resistance.

Christine Wilks’ Women, Politics and Poetics

In this paper we present a close reading of the electronic literature works Sitting Pretty (2004), IntraVenus (2005), Fitting the Pattern (2008) and Underbelly (2010) by Christine Wilks with the aim of reflecting on how the body of the “Woman” is represented in these works, through which mechanisms the gender is constructed in them and how these bodies of women are registered in a feminine and feminist genealogy. There is, without a doubt, in Wilks’s work a unitary discursive thread about gender identity that evolves and transforms as the narrative mechanisms of the author and, consequently, our reading process, change; the power of the word over the body in Sitting Pretty and the strength of the naked body in IntraVenus are the initial drawing of a particular and personal discourse about the genre that will become more complex and profound in Fitting the Pattern and Underbelly. In Fitting the Pattern we have to cut, sew and weave to know the thoughts of the daughter, the addressee of the pattern that is made. Reading, as an act of creative craftsmanship, coupled with the memory of women who rework, stitch after stitch, maternal relationships, in a textual fabric that makes the identity of a young woman and the memory of a long female genealogy. Genealogy which, on the other hand, is omnipresent in Underbelly, an immersive reading experience that introduces mining women in the 19th century England along with the thoughts of a sculptress about her process as an artist who is wondering about the possibility of being a mother. The texts that narrate Sitting Pretty, IntraVenus, Fitting the Pattern and Underbelly appear in the most diverse and heterogeneous forms, however the images in these works are representations of the body of the woman from different points of view: the physical body, the body of desire, the body covered, the inner body. These works, in addition, due to their specific and special characteristics, experience a process of poetization with peculiar rhetorical mechanisms that are configured in digital poetic narratives: orality, metaphors, alliterations, metonimies, rhythm, analogies, polysemy … Reading these four works is an interactive experience of the body, an intellectual dialogue about the meaning of the word and power, the body and the image, reading and memory, women and the creation through times and spaces and practicing, with reading, the exercise of a poetic and political view.

Representations of Health and Wellness on Instagram: An Analysis of 285,000 Posts

Image-based social media is experiencing a significant increase in popularity among adolescents and young adults (Pew Research Center, 2018). On Instagram, Health Influencers share magazine-ready images that communicate health and wellness to millions of followers. These images have been criticized by academics and the public alike as self-promotional, lacking a scientific basis, and promoting Western beauty standards and thin-ideals. Given Health Influencers' considerable social reach and mounting concern that certain types of Instagram content can negatively affect young people’s mental health and body image, it is important to assess the social costs of their posting habits. While empirical research has identified types of posts that contribute to body image issues (e.g., selfies exhibiting naked body parts), research on the prevalence of these posts in health messages on Instagram is more limited. To this end, we analyzed the most frequently used hashtags of 784 Health Influencers with ten-thousand or more followers and fit an unsupervised topic model to over 285,000 of their posts. This analysis revealed that a majority of health and wellness content on Instagram is related to four themes: Cosmetics and Appearance, Self-promotion, Fitness, and General Wellness. Furthermore, while many posts appear to promote health habits (e.g., vegan food recipes or posts of inspiration and encouragement), a substantial number of images contain content previous research has suggested can lead to body-image and self-esteem issues (e.g., photos promoting thin-body ideals). Future work will package this model as a web application that informs users of their own potentially harmful posting behaviors.

WOMEN IMAGES IN PICASSO'S CUBIC PAINTINGS

Since the history of humanity, the image of women has always been attractive; poetry, as well as painting and sculpture, novels, stories and many other subjects have been the subject.The beauty of the woman, sometimes her ugliness, sometimes her sorrows, sorrows, tears, joys and excitement sometimes inspired a poet or a painter, sculptor, writer, composer. A woman's portrait, her naked body, her nobility, and even her identity have led to wars between very powerful civilizations.In the works of Spanish painter Picasso, one of the most important, different and even the most critically acclaimed artists of the 20th century, the image of woman is frequently encountered. Picasso, who has received many criticisms from some circles, has been approved and regarded as a genius by some circles, especially in his Cubic paintings, depicting women's portraits and women's bodies in different geometric shapes.Picasso stated that he was influenced by many artists and works by saying I get what I need from other artists ve and that he used what they found appropriate in his own works without hesitation.The aim of this study is to examine Picasso's works with a female image in her cubic paintings and to evaluate her perspective towards women. Fort his reason, this study is a qualitative research method which is a due diligence model and the data is analyzed with document analysis method. The results of the study are important in terms of analyzing the image of women in Picasso’s Works and being a source for other scientific researches. Keywords: Picasso, female image, cubism,women portraits, modern art

“Aspects of an anti-Trump guerrilla campaign”

During the 2016 presidential election debates, Donald Trump became the subject of a guerrilla campaign initiated by the anarchist group Indicline, through which five grotesque nude statues of the Republican candidate were installed in various cities in the United States. The message was not accidental considering that nude photos of Melania Trump from the beginning of her modelling career were re-published simultaneously. Through aesthetic antithesis, the image of the naked body was supposed to stigmatize the couple in public perception, starting from an artificial reality created in the everyday landscape, but which had to become viral in the online environment.

Aliaa Elmahdy, Nude Protest, & Transnational Feminist Body Politics

Women’s bodies represent a particularly contested symbolic terrain, especially within the political contexts of nationalism, globalization, revolution, occupation, and decolonization. Karina Eileraas Karakus asks how we might read women’s naked bodies in protest movements relative to gender and sexuality issues raised within the “Arab Spring” and transnational feminist praxis. By focusing on the “nude Egyptian blogger” Aliaa Elmahdy, who has deployed her naked body as a tool of resistance in cyberspace and on the streets, she argues that Elmahdy’s nude protest marks a moment of transition in the evolution of feminist protest. Within this shifting landscape, this chapter shows how the theater of feminist protest is both expanded and challenged by a new generation of feminists who navigate between conventional street protest and novel modes of cyber-attack while contributing new perspectives to longstanding debates about women’s artistic and political agency and the empowering potentials of female nudity.

Before Body Scanning There was Looker

This paper uses the film Looker (Michael Crichton, 1981) to highlight how a group of filmmakers and technologists imagined the sinister side of computer-automated biometrics would unfold in late twentieth century United States. The film depicts a scene in which a young female model gets her naked body scanned for a multinational corporation that will capitalize on the 3D computer model created from her likeness. An analysis of the body scanning scene and behind-the-scenes production processes raise new questions about the legacy of biometric imaginaries in the United States and helps us see in new ways how a set of concerns crystallized around the computerization of personal identifiable information, including physical bodies. While fears of computer automation existed in previous decades, by the early 1980s, the stakes heightened as biometric and photosensing technologies could sense and gather data computationally.

Slavery Memorials

This essay focuses on the beheaded statue of Empress Joséphine along with visual and performance artist Sarah Trouche’s reappropriations of the politically motivated beheading, the Memorial Cap 110 Mémoire et Fraternité, and the traveling Memorial of the Names of Abolition. The study contends that these memorials encapsulate the entangled history and memory of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery, and interrogate the traditional definition of archives, museums and the institutionalized aesthetics of marble memorials. Hence, the statue of Joséphine is examined as a palimpsestic memorial because of the ideological repurposing of the city scape surrounding the statue, as well as Sarah Trouche’s meaningful use of her naked body as a theatrical canvass to map out cogent solidarities about the turbulent memory of slavery. The historical distinctiveness of the Cap110 Memorial is explored for its power to serve as an intangible witness to the Middle Passage and excavate from under the beauty of its natural environment traces of historical turbulence. As palimpsestic anarchives and post-museums, the Cap110 Memorial along with the Memorial of the Names of the Abolition foster post and decolonial performances of remembrance.