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Cultural products and discourses about erotic pleasure have recently proliferated, leading to what the author calls "the pleasure turn." In studies of African culture, "the pleasure turn" can be read as decentering the dominant paradigm that has mostly associated black nakedness with negative emotions: sorrow, pain, and humiliation. Illustrative of the turn is the 2009 exhibition Beauty and Pleasure in South African Contemporary Art, which considered pain and suffering as overrated and sought to provide a more accurate picture of life on the continent as a mix of pleasure and pain. This article closely reads the South African multimedia artist Dineo Bopape's 2008 Silent Performance, alongside Berni Searle's 2001 politically charged Snow White, to point out their generative potential for the intersection of the visual media, erotic pleasure, and nudity. Traditional views of pleasure have avoided the nexus of erotic pleasure and the visual because of their historical association with nineteenth-century scientific racism. The author argues Bopape's and Searle's images exceed a single and stable interpretation. By inserting their (semi-)naked bodies as central images, they invite yet resist unwanted readings of erotic pleasure in their works. Incorporating her analysis of these works into her conceptualization of images of black female nudity in art, the author proposes that a robust attention be given the visual image in the rising conversation on pleasure in African studies.

Der Beitrag untersucht die Geschichte des Badens bzw. der Badekultur als "Schnittstelle" zwischen Hygiene und Scham im Rahmen einer Rekonstruktion der Vorgeschichte der Freikörperkulturbewegung. Der Autor sieht hier einen fruchtbaren Ansatzpunkt, an dem sich der "Umgang mit Nacktheit und die damit verbundenen moralischen Auseinandersetzungen" darstellen lassen. Die zeitlich und gesellschaftlich bedingte Verhaltenspraxis der Scham verweist in der Verbindung mit Bademode und dem Ort des Badens (im Freien oder der Badeanstalt) nicht nur auf ein wichtiges Moment der Distinktion von Lebensstilen, sondern auch auf den Anteil von für "natürlich" gehaltener Hygiene am Zivilisationsprozeß. Der Autor zeigt insgesamt, dass das Baden mit oder ohne Badehose bzw. Badekleid nicht nur eine Frage lokaler Gegebenheiten war, sondern auch im Deutschen Kaiserreich zu einer "Weltanschauungsfrage" wurde. (ICA)

Public Nudity and the Rhetoric of the Body examines instances of public nudity where sexuality is at the forefront of public body display. It presents case studies that raise discussions about identity, self-determination, and sexuality, and illustrate the complicated rhetorical nature of the human body in the public sphere.

Preface: the day i got (almost) naked in public -- Introduction : visual rhetoric and the sexual body -- Nudity, communication, and the first amendment -- The naturist photography of Jock Sturges -- The confrontational nudity of Milo Moiré -- Femen and the rhetoric of topless protest -- Aliaa Magda Elmahdy's retrieval of shock performance art -- Ritualistic nudity during Mardi Gras -- Leather pride at the Folsom Street fair -- Conclusion: the public body -- Bibliography.

Female nudity in advertising varies greatly across Europe and the world. However, in studying extant literature regarding female nudity in advertising a number of limitations emerge. In particular, existing research into consumer attitudes fails to recognize sexuality and cultural differences. The aim of this research is to explore and describe consumer attitudes to the depiction of female nudity in advertising in the UK; a previously overlooked context. In addition, in order to overcome omissions in existing empirical research, a secondary aim is to explore such issues from a variety of perspectives by noting and incorporating into the analysis participant sexuality. The literature review concentrates on the key areas of sex roles in advertising, sex appeal and arousal in advertising, female nudity in advertising and the application of literary, feminist and art theory to advertising research. Thereafter follows a discussion and justification of focus groups as the chosen method that incorporates a detailed description of the informants (including details of informant sexuality and sex) as well as a breakdown of the choice of advertising material. Following from this are the results and discussion that focus on six key themes: sex and sex approval; the gaze; sexual and non-sexual use of nudity; femininity and androgyny; congruence; and authorial intent and reader response. The article concludes with a discussion of the main implications of the study and with the forwarding of suggestions for further research.

Literature and art -- Profaning the Messiah or why can't Dulcinea love us? -- A Messianic aesthetic: Lily Briscoe's vision -- The melancholic and Messianic allure of Venice or how best to access the inaccessible -- Non-unveilable nudity: death in Venice -- Agamben's open: Coetzee's dis-grace -- The glorious body: the nude in art -- Theory (Heidegger and Lacan) -- Agamben's post-metaphysical metapolitics: departing from Heidegger -- Is the gaze a state of exception.

The purpose of the article is to analyse the semiotics of the body in visual culture of the late 20th and early 21st centuries using the example of fashion photography; to find out how the body has turned from a passive screen for displaying socially and culturally significant markers into an active agent of shaping fashion trends. The research methodology is based on a combination of different approaches to describing the semantic nuances of the body image in modern fashion photography. In particular, with the help of the historical and genealogical method, the evolution of the narrative focus of fashion photography is shown, since at first attention was paid first of all to the beauty of the thing being sold, then to the idealised body. A structural approach was applied to analyse the multiple contexts of fashion photography, such as the perception of a material thing, its photographic representation and expert review. All of them are components of the fashion discourse. Using the epistemological method, the semantics of the concepts of nakedness (as acquired vulnerability) and nudity (as harmonious integrity) are distinguished. The scientific novelty of the study consists in revealing numerous semiotic contexts of the phenomenon of nudity in fashion photography, which is always aestheticised compositionally, colouristically, and cosmetically depending on the cultural environment and cultural era, and therefore naked physicality is a discursive phenomenon, like fashion in general. Conclusions. Corporeality in fashion photography of the 20th century expresses the incessant processuality of postmodern semiosis – the recoding of the world of things into the dimension of signs. The human body becomes a screen for the projection of these signs, the principle of an ongoing game, the eternal engine of advertising discourse to multiplicate visual images. The devaluation of things in the European culture of mass consumption of the second half of the 20th century, caused by their overproduction, contributed to a change in the critical focus of fashion from the clothes in which the human body is wrapped to the body itself. Elitism is no longer defined as a set of precious or luxurious things that a person desires to own and that require a financial investment. Instead, the signifier of exclusivity in late modern Western society is a healthy and attractive body. It requires competent care, medicalisation, sports training, and, therefore, in addition to financial, also investments of time and knowledge. Thus, the fashion photography of the end of the 20th – the first quarter of the 21st century shows the shift in the focus of the fashion discourse from the aesthetics of things to the aesthetics of lifestyle and self-creation, for which the human body serves as a screen.
Key words: fashion, fashion photography, corporeality, nudity, nakedness.

The volume discusses nudity and clothing in the Hebrew Bible, covering anthropological, theological, archaeology and religious-historical aspects. These aspects are addressed in three separate sections, enhanced by over a hundred pictures and illustrations. Part I places nudity and clothing in its ancient Israelite context, with discussions of methodology, the ancient Near Eastern evidence (including material culture and iconography, and an assessment of central aspects of the biblical material such as fabrication and uses of textiles, lexicography, theological and anthropological implications). Part II looks at key themes such as mourning, death, encounters with the divine and issues of power and status. Finally, Part III presents several close studies of key passages from narrative, prophetic and wisdom texts where clothing and nudity play an important role

The article examines the relations between photography, body, nudity, and sexuality. It presents changing relations of photography with a naked or semi-naked body and different forms and recording conventions. From the mid-19th century the naked body became the subject of scientifically grounded photographic explorations, an allegorical motif referring to painting traditions, an object of interest and excitement for the newly-developed "touristic" perspective. These three main ways in which photographs depicting nudity were being taken at that time shaped three visual modes: artistic-documentary, ethnographic-travelling, and scientific-medical. It has deep cultural consequences, including those in the ways of shaping the notions of the corporeal and the sexual. Collaterally, one more, probably prevalent in numbers, kind of photographical images arose: pornographic. In the middle of the 19th century, the repertoire of pornographic pictures was already very wide, and soon it become one of the photographic pillars of visual imagination of the modern society, appealing to private and professional use of photography, popular culture, advertisement, art. The number of erotic and pornographic pictures rose hand over fist with the development of digital photography. Access to pornographic data is easy, fast, and cheap, thanks to the Internet, as it never was before. Photography has fuelled pornography, laying foundations for a massive and lucrative business, employing a huge group of professional sex workers. How all those processes affected our imagination and real practices, what does the staggering number of erotic photography denote? One possible answer comes from Michel Foucault who suggests that our civilization does not have any ars erotica, but only scientia sexualis. Creating sexual discourse became an obsession of our civilization, and its main pleasure is the pleasure of analysis and a constant production of truth about sex. Maybe today the main pleasure is about watching technically registered images, and perhaps that is why we may consider visual redefinition of the body as the main social effect of the invention of the photography.