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Beach Bodies.
Jennifer Webb, Professional Writing, School of Creative Communication and Culture Studies, University of Canberra
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The beach, as is widely covered in the literature, occupies a privileged place in the Australian imaginary, and its identity and role have been intensively addressed by any number of books and debates. I would like to take a sideways look at the beach, seeing it as a jumping-off point for a discussion of the body, since it is on the beach that bodies are most comfortably and obviously visible. Bodies, I suggest, are at once the site of vitality and dynamic existence and the site of decay; they are also the point of intersection between the self and the natural world, the self and the social world. Each of these aspects is apparent in the ways in which we perform at the beach, and the ways in which the body and the self have been metaphorized in images and stories of people at the beach. Drawing on stories from the Picador book of the beach, and turning to theorists of cultural production - particularly Jean Baudrillard, Michel de Certeau and Paul Virilio - I will examine the ways in which bodies insert themselves into the narrative of the beach, and variously celebrate or contest its status as the quintessentially Australian space.
