Bodily Privacy: Essential Characteristics and Visual Defence Practices

Abstract

This article dwells on bodily privacy as an opportunity to independently determine the self-presentation of one’s body in a public space. The author performed a sociocultural analysis of the bodily aspect of privacy and identified its essential characteristics. It is indicated here that the attitude towards the body and its public presentation depends on sociocultural norms. Starting from the modern period, European society has seen a growing tendency towards self-control and regulation of one’s affects. Bodily manifestations and feelings have been pushed behind the scenes of public life, into the private sphere. Nudity and sexuality now belong to the realm of social conventions of the private sphere. People want to keep their bodily functions hidden, especially when it comes to regressive bodily states, such as illness or death. Inability to conceal certain (private) parts of the body and certain bodily functions from other people’s glances is degrading. The practice of bodily deprivation is used in total institutions, such as camps, prisons and psychiatric hospitals, taking away a person’s sense of security and freedom. The need to hide from the glance of the Other arises from the fact that a person sees him/herself from someone else’s perspective. The development of self-awareness is associated with the experience of one’s own bodily vulnerability, since the subject appears to others through his/her own body. The most famous description of the loss of childlike ingenuousness in the perception of one’s own corporeality is contained in the biblical story about the expulsion from paradise. The “gaze culture” prevalent in contemporary Western societies is a rejection of sexually connoted glances, the obligation to conceal corporeality shifting from the perceived to the perceiver. Tact, respect for bodily boundaries, and gaze culture are conventional cultural practices nowadays allowing us to protect the bodily privacy of an individual.