https://mediaspace.illinois.edu/media/t/1_xvf5v3tr
The nude protesters in this video clearly state their motives and cause, which is that they are against Donald Trump and his presidential campaign. The next footage will be from the movement I am focusing on for this project, the World Naked Bike Ride. My main argument regarding WNBR is for the lack of clarity and meaning between the protest strategy of public nudity and for their actual cause that they are protesting for. If I didn’t tell you what they were protesting about, what would you guess? For more bike paths? Nope. But that’s what the people in this photo are protesting about in Peru. Yet, it doesn’t look different from the WNBR, right? Well then, what is the World Naked Bike Ride about? Why are these people riding bikes naked in public streets?
The use of public nudity as a part of a protest’s strategy has been widely used throughout history for various causes and movements. In this image, the protest is about women’s rights from FEMEN, which is a radical feminist activist group. In the past, women protested about their right and equality but with more clothing. In this image, it’s about animal cruelty, specifically against seal slaughtering by PETA, an American animal rights organization. This movement is for against the use of animal fur for production in things like clothes.
The WNBR is actually mainly about the fight against climate change and the use of carbon-emitting transportation like cars. In the following images, these nude protests are also for battling climate change. But the location of the glacier or the surrounding shrubbery is intuitively more meaningful and relatable to climate change than naked people riding bikes. Now, as a counter argument, you could say in these select images of the WNBR, there are words and phrases like “one less car, ride bare for clean air, no fuel used” explicitly painted onto the protesters and this helps to describe why they are naked to onlooking bystanders. However, many footages of the WNBR show that not all of the bike riders explicitly label on themselves for why they are riding a bike in public naked.
The protest strategy of using public nudity is quite a peculiar choice for protesting the use carbon-emitting transportation like cars. The meaning of the message behind the World Naked Bike Ride can certainly be more transparent and clear to onlooking bystanders.