What Nudism Exposes

OCTOBER 2022

288 pages, 6 x 9 in., 24 b&w photos 978-0-7748-6720-7 HC $89.95 USD / £72.00 GBP also available as an e-book

CANADIAN HISTORY / SOCIAL MOVEMENTS / CULTURAL STUDIES / GENDER & SEXUALITY STUDIES

An Unconventional History of Postwar Canada

Mary-Ann Shantz

What Nudism Exposes offers an original perspective on postwar Canada by situating the nudist movement within the broader social and cultural context and considering how nudist clubs navigated changing times. As the nudist movement took root in Canada after the Second World War, its adherents advanced the idea that going nude and looking at the bodies of others satisfied natural curiosity, loosened the hold of social taboos, and encouraged mental health. By the 1970s, nudists switched their focus to promoting the pleasurable aspects of their practice. Mary-Ann Shantz contends that throughout the postwar decades, nudists sought social approval as they engaged with contemporary concerns about childrearing, pornography, and public nudity. This perceptive, eminently readable book explains the perspectives of the movement while questioning its assumptions. What nudism ultimately exposes is how the body figures at the intersection of nature and culture, the individual and the social, the private and the public.

MARY-ANN SHANTZ is a historian, researcher, and project manager who lives in Edmonton, Alberta. She is a contributor to Contesting Bodies and Nation in Canadian History and has been published in Histoire sociale/Social History and the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth.

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