Thread by @monaeltahawy

I do all my Zoom calls & webinars with a portrait of a topless activist as my background and “The Revolution is My Cunt” is a saying of mine.

BUT what the actual fuck is this statue and whose gaze is it for?

theguardian.com/books/2020/nov…

Again: nudity is not the issue. What is being conveyed and for whose gaze is.

Why, after years of so few statues of women, is the naked female form of statues being erected for & about women?

Whether it’s a statue for #MaryWollstonecraft in #London or #Medusa in #NYC

And: which female form is being celebrated by those statues?

A cisgender woman’s body that is considered attractive to a heterosexual male gaze.

I reject slut shaming. There is nothing wrong with nudity.

But whose terms is it on and whose body does it celebrate is the Q?

There is a long history of women using semi/naked bodies as protest.

The portrait behind me in my videos is from artist Nadine Faraj’s exhibit Naked Revolt. It is of #Egyptian activist Aliaa Mahdy who I wrote about in 2011 google.com/amp/s/amp.theg…

In 2015, activists who were part of the Oakland-based organization BlackOUT Collective, donned the painted names of Black women victims of police brutality on their bare chests as they marched down a busy San Francisco street during rush hour. refinery29.com/en-us/2015/05/…

Whose nudity is allowed/celebrated? Demonstrators from the #SayHerName movement in San Francisco told BuzzFeed News that their photos were taken down from Facebook and Instagram for violating the social media platforms’ standards on nudity. google.com/amp/s/www.buzz…

“Public nakedness has been documented as a means of political protest worldwide, in vastly different cultural contexts from India to Russia. In Kenya, it has been used from pre-colonial times to the modern day.” google.com/amp/s/theconve…

In 1929 in #Nigeria, “women protested British imperial rule and local chiefs' compliance through body activism, which included what we would refer to today as topless protests.” mic.com/articles/11929…

“Naked protests in Africa have historically been symbolic forms of collective protest,generally by the poorest & most marginalised women in society...Women have used these forms of protest throughout history & in many parts of the world, but esp in Africa” africanarguments.org/2016/06/10/any…

So whose bodies are allowed to be naked and when?

This is my friend artist Nadine Faraj whose art has celebrated naked protests in Naked Revolt - from where this painting of Aliaa is from. And also queerness and transgender bodies (next tweet) in Get Used To Us.
📷 @rerutled

“You might own the gaze but the glorious bodies you are looking at own the pride.

I own my body. Not the state, the street or the home, not the temple.”

I wrote this to accompany Nadine’s the Get Used To Us exhibit

nyartbeat.com/event/2019/EF73

Several examples I have above are of naked protests and not specifically public art.

But the thread that weaves through my thread: whose bodies and why?

And why, after so few statues of women, is the naked female form the one being erected?

#MaryWollstonecraft

I will probably turn this into an essay for FEMINIST GIANT.

I wrote this on public displays of the male body recently: Whether feminine or femme, disabled or fat, fascist patriarchy has no room on its stage for you. feministgiant.substack.com/p/essay-macho-…

For more of my feminist analysis of global patriarchal fuckery, sign up.

It’s free. And if you can pay, it helps to keep it free for everyone feministgiant.substack.com/p/coming-soon

The rest of the thread

https://twitter.com/monaeltahawy/status/1326167145718353920