The Stripped Body: Flesh and Social Significance
The stripped body and exposed flesh is not void of social meaning, nor does the stripped body lack gender entirely because of its lack of clothing. In discussing Beauvoir’s ideology of “becoming” one’s gender, Butler articulates that we “never experience our bodies pure and simple, i.e. as our ‘sex,’ because we never know our sex outside of its expression as gender” (Butler 39). This is a product of the reality of living in one’s body in a social world. The process of “becoming” includes agency and acculturation, and to return fully to the initial “pure” sexed body would be to ignore and deny one’s lived reality in the social world. Butler identifies the body as “a directional force…lived and experienced as the context and medium for all human strivings,” rather than a meaningless vessel in which a disembodied soul inhabits. Butler goes on to reference Sartre, who states that the “natural body” without social significance is “an ‘inapprehensible,’ and hence a fictional starting point for an explanation of the body as lived” (Butler 39). This ideology undermines the “mere flesh without social connotation” that Schaefer identifies on the stripped body. Yes, stripping exposes “mere flesh,” and may reference the notion of the natural, pure body, but stripping does not remove all social realities. In the striptease, when the stripper removes her clothing, she exposes her bare yet lived body; her bare body's potentials of social significance becoming all the more highlighted.
The stripped body has rid itself of clothing, but not of gesture, an equally important mode of repetition and thus reproduction of one’s gender. In Lili St. Cyr’s 1953, A Bedroom Fantasy, we see this play out clearly. After her initial strip from evening gown to lingerie, Lili’s maid re-dresses her in a sheer slip with an elaborate pink robe over it. Lili proceeds to gesture and dance in her night gown: she twirls and spins, reaches her arms upwards, arches her back, lays on the floor and extends her legs upwards, and gestures with her hand in a twirling manner. She then strips off the pink robe, and continues to dance with only the sheer slip; her skin now exposed, and her body now visible. She engages in the same routines and repetitions. While she has removed one of the markers of difference, and as Schaefer articulates, throws “one of the marks of gender out the proverbial window,” her body’s actions (more visible without excess clothing) suggest a continual reproduction of other codes of gender, rather than a dismissal of gender.
Although I argue that stripping garments does not radically strip the body of social meaning and perceptions in actuality, I do not deny the significance of this garment stripping. As mentioned earlier, the potential reversal of a mode of "becoming" that stripping suggests exists. Exposing a potentially liberated and un-contained female body subverts patriarchy that seeks to contain women and their bodies. For example, The Motion Pictures Association with America refused to give a seal to an original cut of Mickey Ginger Jone's Midnight Frolics because of her removal of her brassier, exposing "unbrassiered breasts." Schaefer highlights the importance of the concern with her "unbrassiered breasts," rather than simply a concern with her breasts (Schaefer 57). Jone's removal of her bra, and the censorship that that removal solicited exhibits the transgression in stripping garments.
Works Cited:
Butler, Judith. “Sex and Gender in Simone De Beauvoir's Second Sex.” Yale French Studies 72 (1986): 35–49. Web. 11 Nov. 2015
Butler, Judith. “Why Bodies Matter.” Teatro Maria Matos in Lisbon, 2 June 2015. Conference.
Schaefer, Eric. “The Obscene Seen: Spectacle and Transgression in Postwar Burlesque Films.” Cinema Journal 36.2 (1997): 41–66. Web. 20 October 2015.
