What is obscene about nudity? Between the medieval virgin and contemporary silhouettes

Abstract

Starting from a few 2012 episodes, in which Facebook suspended the accounts of several users that had published pictures of themselves nursing their children, this essay raises some thoughts about some transformations occurred in the past few centuries in western society. The focus is the moral and symbolic displacement surrounding the nudity of the female breast, trying to identify the meaning of the censorship this image has caused in several historical periods. The intention is to contextualize this seemingly anachronistic attitude of the American company, not only as through the analysis of certain protests this gesture has provoked in the internet and the general media, but also resourcing to a genealogic perspective capable of questioning today’s moralization and interdiction that seem to belong to a different era. Summing up, we try to examine the ways in which the mutant effect of the body’s nudity, that has been able to provoke a diversity of scandals, purity, taboo and censorship in different times to comprehend particularly the current and complex meanings of the Facebook episodes of 2012.