The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality

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The drapery is sensuously flowing over and caressing the figures genitalia, charging the erotica of the painting.

With nude models stripped of many of the signifiers denoting queerness or heteronormativity, it can be hard to tell the trans from the cis, the queer from the straight. To be able to take care of our bodies and listen to their new needs day after day is, right now, an act of love for the whole community. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Earth, Culture, Capital, Travel and Autos, delivered to your inbox every Friday. Pérez makes her captivating, emotion-laden images by inviting her subjects to interact with water, letting them connect with a powerful, elemental force of nature that helps them to strip off the facades of identity and ego and go inwards toward the core of who they really are.Proclaiming“every body has a story,” the final print edition of ESPN drops tomorrow, featuring 21 athletes in total. It is a game between what she hides and what she exposes, with this idea introducing an erotic dimension to the painting.

In 1973, the film theorist Laura Mulvey identified a phen­omenon she termed the “male gaze”: the idea that gender (and, we might retrospectively add, sexual orientation) has an effect on what we enjoy looking at and how we present that subject in art. The erotic representation of Danae by Artemisia Gentileschi in 1612, can be compared to the classical mid-17 th century, Venus Attired by the Three Graces created by Anne Killigrew, which also offers similar stimulation to Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun’s Bacchante, exhibited at the French Salon in 1785.This raises the question of what exactly separates a trans body from a cis one and if the lines between the two are really as firm and fixed as current discourse presumes. Given that I define myself as queer not only because of my sexual orientation but especially for my personal way of being – which is reflected in each one of my projects – I believe In Her Rooms and all women I portrayed to be just as queer as I am. Female Nude is a perfect example: a naked woman in a dislocated position, presenting a thin, corpse-like body. Although certain themes do emerge among subgroups of the photographers, these are not – as one might imagine – based in geography.

Female artists have also, throughout history, represented the female form, nude within their art, and often sensuously.Whether it was Milan or Paris, New York or Los Angeles, what mattered to Macrì was to be able to fully grasp and visually express the complex and intense nature of femininity today. Kenneth Clark’s seminal 1956 text ‘The Nude’, explored the manifestation of this binary, heterosexual desire- women were objects to be viewed by the male gaze. A direct witness to the great horrors of the 20th century, Otto Dix never stopped criticizing the violence and absurdity of his time through his painting.