Ruth Barcan, Humanities, UWS Hawkesbury

r.barcan@uws.edu.au

One of the well-known figures of 1950s Australian nudism, the beautifully named Dulcie Dreamer, wrote of "the moral bath of bodily unconsciousness" enjoyed by nudists, including female nudists. This utopian hope is in stark contrast to the prevalent idea within much feminist theory that it is structurally well nigh impossible for woman to bask in the pleasures of unconsciousness -- and especially not bodily unconsciousness. This belief is powerfully encapsulated in Mulvey's famous expression (drawing on Berger) -- woman's "to-be-looked-at-ness."

Moreover, women are, according to Irigaray, already metaphorically naked. "Woman," she argues, "must be nude because she is not situated, does not situate herself in her place. Her clothes, her makeup, and her jewels are the things with which she tries to create her container(s), her envelope(s). She cannot make use of the envelope that she is, and must create artificial ones" (An Ethics of Sexual Difference 11). It follows from this, then, that shame must always be, among other things, a gendered experience.

Meanwhile, back on the beach, how do such ideas resonate with Australian female nudists? They clearly experience bodily pleasure. Do they also experience moments of bodily unconsciousness, and if so, is this a kind of "liberation?" Is the nudist beach a utopian site in which women can extricate themselves from the Sartrean "dialectic of self and other, of seeing and being seen, of humiliation and domination" (Sarup 35)? This paper, which draws on ethnographic research, is a study of one particular kind of utopianism 'on the beach.'