Do women have to be naked to get into the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York? Less than 4% of the artists in the Modern Art section are women, but 76% of the nudes are female. This is the dictum of the New York Guerrilla Girls campaign which has been repeated three times since 1989. In fact, since then, the representation of female artists, in this apparently world-class institution, has dropped in numbers. Outside such institutional contexts is where the nude is used by women to convey more than just sex appeal.

The #freethenipple campaign began in Iceland in 2014 when a college feminist society decided to protest Instagram’s censorship policy. In response, thousands of women posted pictures of their bare breasts in protest to what they deemed a double standard of censorship, which forbid the posting of female nipples on the basis that they are inherently sexually explicit. This includes photos of women breastfeeding, which have been deemed too obscene for the public eye. Of course, this idea comes from a heteronormative framework in which female bodies exist primarily as sexual objects of desire for straight men, whilst male chests are constructed as innocent, lustless, simple skin. Coupled with the fact that these images aren’t marketable commodities as is the case with the majority of visual economies of the female flesh, it makes sense that Instagram’s rigid stance on the issue is not subject to change any time soon.

Yet nudity in this context is not just vague subversion for subversion’s sake; there is a relevant contextual backdrop. This web of political complexities is thickened when we consider the intersection of representations of the naked feminine body with race, ethnicity, and culture of origin in art and galleries. The same politics of the female nude apply in the realm of visual cultures such as photography, advertising, and social media.

Through depiction in art, media and other forms of visual cultures, stereotypes, roles and standards are formed which become crystallised in our social consciousness. In which case, power relations are fundamental to the concept of visual representation, especially concerning sites of vulnerability such as the nude. According to the feminist politics of positioning, the “bearer of the look” ― in other words, the artist or photographer and their gaze ― holds more power than naked subjects being conveyed in the resulting images. That’s why when women take the camera into their own hands and shoot themselves: they are using it as a technology of resistance.

Bare chests became a focal point of Western feminist online activism for a host of prominent celebrities such as Cara Delevigne, Rihanna and Miley Cyrus. Yet one thing is clear: #freethenipple is vastly composed of white, thin, conventionally beautiful, perky and respectable racks. This is precisely the problem with white feminism: those who have the privilege of navigating patriarchy with a social visa of whiteness and a beauty that mimics standardised airbrushed media norms tend to conveniently forget their sisters whose bodies  don’t.  These are their sisters who are black and brown, fat, differently abled, hairy, and who are underrepresented because they exist on the outskirts of representational convention. They also tend to live outside the kinds of Western societies where the censorship of a nipple is deemed worthy of such activist energies.

The absence of black women’s bodies as purveyors of respectable beauty affects not just mainstreams visual cultures, but also carves a haunting hole in the art world. Art historian Judith Wilson did a study in the 90s on images of blackness in Western art; a vast archive of over 25 thousand images revealed that black female nudes were rarely painted by African American artists in the 19th century. The only recorded image she could find in this century was of a black female nude painted by a visiting Swiss artist. Only in the 20th century did the black female nude become a permissible subject of depiction in Western art.

Postmodernist African American painter Emma Amos claimed that when a black female nude is represented in art, there are disparate connotations between portrayals of white female bodies: “It means something else when a black woman has no clothes on, it means that you are for sale.” The powerful work of artist, Nona Faustine, in her photographic series White Shoes explores the legacy of New York’s slave trade by positioning herself completely nude, except for a pair of white high heels, in parts of the city built on the sweat and blood of slavery. The shoes she wears represent the patriarchy which we cannot escape, but it is significant that she is using her body to reclaim this oppressive grip by walking on it. She uses her bare flesh to lament the legacy of slavery and resist against the white standard of female beauty which plagues our media.

Perhaps one of the most subversive acts of resistances using one’s naked body as a political canvas comes from Egyptian ex-Muslim rebel Aliaa Magda Elmahdy, who had to seek political asylum in Sweden for her tactics after uploading a naked photo of herself to her radical women’s rights blog, A Rebel’s Diary. Why nudity? In a raw blogpost, Elmahdy answers with her story of “abuse directed at my body, which is just the average story of any Egyptian woman….I got sexually harassed tens of times daily, which still gives me nightmares, but I only have time to mention a few incidents here. When I was a small child, another small child kept touching my ass in a market. [My parents] said it was normal and my father should walk behind me to prevent it. In middle school, I was sitting next to a boy when he groped my breast in front of a teacher who told me to stop when I yelled at the boy. Another time, another boy verbally harassed me, and another teacher told me I should wear looser shirts. More frequent were the insulting comments … “What are you wearing, slut?” … “I saw your ass.” … “I wanna fuck you.” … “Hey, stupid gal!” … “Can I pop this plastic bag in your face?”

After posting her self-shot nude on her blog, which also contains videos of women walking naked and dancing on the streets of Iran in protest of the repressive state, Elmahdy was kidnaped twice and faced an attempted rape for her “crime”, before fleeing to Sweden. She continues on her blog, “Nudity is used in art to express different things. In my photo, I express my defiance for the view that a female body is a commodity to be owned and controlled.” As a response to Daesh (aka ISIL) who use rape as a weapon of war and hold hundreds of women hostage in sex slave captivities, her most defiant shot to date was her collaboration with another ex-Muslim from Femen, a feminist direct action group known for their nude protest repertoires. Pictured, she menstruates proudly on the Daesh flag, whilst her collaborator defecates and shoves two fingers in the face of this misogynistic regime.

Noted Egyptian-American journalist Mona Eltahawy claimed that Elmahdy “is the Molotov cocktail thrown at the Mubaraks in our heads – the dictators of our mind – which insists that revolutions cannot succeed without a tidal wave of cultural changes that upend misogyny and sexual hypocrisy”. Elmahdy is thus committing cultural warfare, a more militant side of resistance through reclaiming her body, which serves as a loud reminder that stereotypes of Middle-Eastern women as submissive and passive are ill founded. The female nude in art and visual cultures has always been a political battleground, yet most of the shots have been fired not from the confines of the male gaze, but when women reclaim their flesh and use it to get their voices heard.