Political History of the Nude

Though we are all familiar with the female nude as an object of desire and aesthetic beauty, the male nude is rarely present in the visual culture of the last two centuries. Why then were male bodies idealized and eroticized in Revolutionary France, in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany? And what is the link between liberalism and the repression of the male form? The author answers these questions in "A Political History of the Nude", which takes its inspiration from a wealth of disciplines: history, art history, literature, politics, gender and queer studies. He examines the appearance of images of nude men during the French Revolution, the socialist art of the late nineteenth century and the fascist propaganda of the 1930s. The author also discusses Britain post World War II, the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s and the modern phenomenon of boy bands.