Overview
Nudes from Nowhere is the history of the idea that women and the land are analogous. This idea is traced from the earliest etiological myths that present the earth as a womb from which life sprang, to British pornographic texts which feminized nature and masculinized culture. The ultimate effect of treating woman as landscape instead of land is to alter the metaphor of woman from wild nature to cultural artifact. This study further tracks the development of the nature/culture conflict through its growth in pornographic utopian texts to its eventual realization in the British Imperial project. Historic narratives of exploration reinforce the pornography of treating New World lands as women who must be conquered and exploited, and maps from the period make the earth/woman paradigm graphically explicit. European imperialists first used the land as woman metaphor as propaganda to initiate investment and colonization, then as a validation for brutal political actions. Nudes from Nowhere shows how both pornography and imperialism feed on those who lack protection afforded by the privilege of race, class, or gender.