Free and Natural: Nudity and the American Cult of the Body
Title: Free and Natural
Subtitle: Nudity and the American Cult of the Body
Place of publication: Philadelphia
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Year of publication: 2019
Format: 156x235 mm
Pages: 247
Illustrations: 47 black & white
Binding: red boards in colour dust jacket by John Hubbard
Jacket illustration: Paradise Lakes, 1986, by Gerald Davis ®Gerald Davis Estate
Weight: 563 gr.
Original price: N/A
Supplier: Brit Books
Order Number: 67143624
Order Shipped: 3rd August 2020
Entry Number: 2020015
Entry Date: 24th August 2020
BOOK DESCRIPTION
From Naked Juice® to nude yoga, contemporary society is steeped in language that draws a connection from nudity to nature, wellness, and liberation. This branding promotes a "free and natural" lfestyle to mostly white and middle-class Americans intent on protecting their own bodies - and those of society at large - from overwork, environmental toxins, illness, conformity to body standards, and the hypersexualization of the consumer economy. How did the naked body com to be associated with "naturalness," and how has the motion influenced American culture?
Free and Natural explores the cultural history of nudity and its impact on ideas about the body and the environment from the early twentieth century to the present. Sarah Schrank traces the history of nudity, especially public nudity, across the unusual eras and locations where it thrived - including the California desert, Depression era collectives, and 1950s suburban nudist communities - as well as the more predictable beaches and resorts. She also highlights the many tensions it produced. For example, the blurry line between wholesome nudity and sexuality became impossible to sustain when confronted by the cultural challenges of the sexual revolution. Many longtime free and natural lifestyle enthusiasts, fatigued by decades of legal battles, retreated to private homes and resorts while the politics of gay rights, sexual liberation, environmentalism and racial equality of the 1970s inspired a new generation of radical advocates of public nudity.
By the dawn of the twenty-first century, Schrank demonstrates, a free and natural lifestyle that started with antimaterialist, back-to-he-land rural retreats had evolved int a billion-dollar wellness marketplace where "Naked™" sells endless products promising natural health, sexual fulfilment, organic food and hip authenticity. Free and Natural provides an in-depth account of how our bodies have become tethered so closely to modern ideas about nature and identity and yet have been subjected to the excesses of capitalism.
