Abstract
This ethnographic project considers the politics of public sexuality at a Canadian nude beach. This study explores the interaction of the naturist versus sexuality discourses that arise at the beach. On the surface the beach reads like a simple heteronormative space that is controlled and dominated by heterosexual men. Upon further investigation of the discursive field of sexuality at the beach, where different sexual scripts, postures, and identities are elaborated and inscribed, an amalgam of these discourses emerged that complicated the simple power relation of heterosexual males over females and gay men. Rather, as abjected outsiders, women’s and gay men’s bodies and pleasures emerge as a disruptive constitutive force in this contested space. What is at stake in this analysis are bodies and pleasures—not simple sex desire and domination. In the complex flow of sexuality discourse on the beach women and gay men disidentify with “proper” sexed and gendered norms and rearticulate the grounds on which their bodies come to matter.
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Holmes, J.S. Bare bodies, beaches, and boundaries: Abjected outsiders and rearticulation at the nude beach. Sex Cult 10, 29–53 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-006-1025-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-006-1025-1