Lexington Books
Pages: 190
•
978-0-7391-6709-0 • Hardback • June 2012 • $114.00 • (£88.00)
978-0-7391-7702-0 • eBook • June 2012 • $102.50 • (£79.00)
Brett Lunceford is assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of South Alabama.
Chapter 1. Introduction: Naked in Public (For a Cause)
Chapter 2. Chained Women and Running Nudes: PETA's Body Rhetoric
Chapter 3. Weaponizing the Breast: Lactivism and Public Breastfeeding
Chapter 4. Can You See Me Now, Driver? World Naked Bike Ride
Chapter 5. Political Display and the Mediated Body: Exhibition and Politics on CollegeHumor.com
Chapter 6. Conclusion: The Nude Body and the Public Sphere
Brett Lunceford's book is an excellent analysis of how people use their naked bodies rhetorically and politically as a means towards social change. It is inspired, rigorous and thought-provoking scholarship.
— Explorations In Media Ecology
Tracing the naked body as a tool of protest across a range of political protests from the public sphere to online spaces, Brett Lunceford presents a beautifully-argued research which demonstrates the complexity through which naked body rhetoric emerges in the political scene today. Naked Politics provides a concise, historically-informed and highly-accessible analysis of the rhetorical power of nudity as a method of protest.
— Rob Cover, The University of Western Australia
Set within the foundations of rhetorical theory and critique as well as scholarship on social movements, Lunceford focuses on the body as a site of resistance and as a means of persuasion. . . Other scholars have done similar analyses of bodies as symbolic of protest messages, but none have done so extensively and so engagingly as Lunceford, who often attracts his reader’s attention with a personal story, then narrates and analyzes a moment of protest, at times by letting a protester tell his or her story, and finally speculates to what extent the display of nudity seems to convey the chosen message or how that message is misinterpreted or is distorted by the display itself . ... [T]he book [is] an enjoyable and informative read, covering some movements that [are very] familiar such as PETA and lactivism, and some that were new. . . particularly the political protests via CollegeHumor.com. Lunceford certainly has placed his study well within the rhetorical conversation about how bodies can convey rather sophisticated messages and resist normalization. . . . Lunceford. . . has excelled in analyzing how, with each such social movement, the body sets up a problematic and nuanced transaction between the viewer and the nude. The book should be welcomed not only by established rhetorical scholars, particularly those who do ‘‘body work,’’ but also by graduate students who need to encounter such scholarly conversations in their seminars.
— Rhetoric Society Quarterly
This insightful and fascinating close-up look at nude protest draws elegantly on a wide range of social and cultural theory. Moving through a series of well-chosen case studies, it is an intelligent exploration of the complexities and contradictions involved in choosing nakedness as a vehicle for protest.
— Ruth Barcan, The University of Sydney