History Alumna Mary-Ann Shantz Publishes Book on Canadian Nudist Movement

History Alumna Dr. Mary-Ann Shantz has just published a book with UBC Press: What Nudism Exposes: An Unconventional History of Postwar Canada.

Covering the history of the nudist movement in Canada, this book is based on her dissertation. (She completed her Ph.D. with the History Department in 2012, under the supervision of Prof. James Opp.)

About the Book:

What Nudism Exposes offers an original perspective on postwar Canada by situating the nudist movement within the broader social and cultural context and considering how nudist clubs navigated changing times.

As the nudist movement took root in Canada after the Second World War, its members advanced the idea that going nude and looking at the nude bodies of others satisfied natural curiosity, loosened the hold of social taboos, and encouraged mental health. By the 1970s, nudists increasingly emphasized the pleasurable aspects of their practice. Mary-Ann Shantz contends that throughout the postwar decades, nudists sought social approval as they engaged with contemporary concerns about childrearing, sexuality, public nudity, and the natural environment. Nudist clubs were committed to dissociating nudity from sexuality and to creating space for men, women, and children to socialize in the nude, extolling the movement as complementary with modern family life.

This perceptive, eminently readable book explains the perspectives of the nudist movement while questioning its assumptions, particularly the defence of nudity as natural. What nudism ultimately exposes is how the body figures at the intersection of nature and culture, the individual and the social, the private and the public.

This highly original work will find an audience among students and scholars of Canadian history and those more broadly interested in transnational histories of the body, gender and sexuality, and childhood. General readers of Canadian history and the history of the postwar period will also put it on their reading lists.

About the Author:

Mary-Ann Shantz is a historian, researcher, and project manager who lives in Edmonton, Alberta. She is a contributor to Contesting Bodies and Nation in Canadian History and has been published in Histoire sociale/Social History and the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth.