Free and Natural: Nudity and the American Cult of the Body. Nature and Culture in America. By Sarah Schrank

Abstract

In this thoughtful and wide-ranging study, Sarah Schrank explores a variety of naked body practices Americans have pursued in their quest for a natural and authentic life. Schrank’s book begins with a discussion of the organized nudist movement, which originated in Germany at the turn of the twentieth century and was taken up in the United States in the 1930s. But far from revisiting terrain covered in Brian Hoffman’s recent study of the movement, Naked: A Cultural History of American Nudism (2015), Schrank expands her focus to include discussion of: postwar domestic architecture intended to facilitate nude and natural living; the adoption of nudity for therapeutic purposes and the rise of therapeutic nude retreats during the 1960s and 1970s; the development of a swinging subculture that combined social nudity, group sex, and suburban living, as well as the sexualization of the suburbs in pulp fiction and pornography; the emergence of a free beach movement and the fight to carve out public space for nudity; and the use of nudity in marketing everything from smoothies to anti-PETA campaigns, as well as the rise in popularity of nude yoga and nude tourism. Her research concentrates on the post–World War II period through to the present, and combines a nationwide perspective with a particular geographic focus on Southern California. As Schrank explains, this focus reflects both the high number of nudist resorts, free beach struggles, and legal obscenity cases fought in the region, as well as the fact that “nowhere is the American cult of the body more closely associated with place than Southern California,” with its celebrity culture, the popularity of cosmetic surgery and physical fitness, beach culture, and the pornography industry (p. 12).