ART & PROTEST

Women’s bodies are one of the biggest battlegrounds we face today. By using her own naked body, Victoria aims to reveal and challenge the way that women are judged by society - to stand up to the toxic way in which women are divided into “bodies” and “brains” or “good girls” and “whores”, and to break what she calls “the cult of female modesty”.

Across the world, women’s respect and worth is conditional on their bodily modesty, including the degree to which they cover up. Women who do not abide by what is expected of them - those who are scantily clad or deemed “promiscuous” - are classified as “whores” and treated with zero respect. In some parts of the world, women’s lives are constrained in multiple ways by attempts to protect and police what is considered to be their all-important bodily honour, and in some cases the honour of entire families or communities is constructed on the back of it. From limitations on their ability to work and travel to virginity testing, forced veiling and female genital cutting, this cult of female modesty fuels policies and social practices that hurt - rather than help - women’s freedom and opportunities. Gender inequality can only be tackled by challenging the deep-seated belief that a woman’s value rests on her bodily modesty.

Sadly, rather than diminishing with time, the cult of female modesty is growing. Inside as well as outside of feminism, immodest women are being blamed for all kinds of social ills, including for sexism itself. By using her own naked body in art, protest and performance, Victoria helps to reveal and challenge the notion that immodest women lack self-respect, are “trashy” and worthless.

In 2014 Victoria commissioned a nude portrait by Anthony Connolly, which was exhibited at The Mall Galleries in London. After the media controversy that followed, Victoria wrote in The Guardian that she aimed “to raise questions about the depiction of women”:

Five years later, in 2019, Victoria life-modelled for two further portraits by Connolly, one of which went on display at the Mall Galleries, and the other of which was placed on display as part of the People’s Portrait Collection, held at Girton College, Cambridge. These portraits depict Victoria in a natural and comfortable state, in a less confrontational and instead more thoughtful pose, reclining whilst reading.

In addition to working with artists, Victoria has also conducted numerous naked protests, and performed nude on stage at The Cambridge Junction theatre, at Dartington Literary Festival, and at the Chester Diversity Festival.

In 2016, Victoria protested Britain’s exit from the European Union with the message “Brexit Leaves Britain Naked”, attending the end-of-year academic meetings at the University of Cambridge in her birthday suit. As Brexit unfolded, Victoria continued to make a stand, releasing a series of naked videos explaining why she thought Britain should reverse course.

In 2019, on the eve of the parliamentary vote on Britain’s Brexit deal, Victoria gave a one-woman nude performance at The Cambridge Junction theatre, titled “Brexit: The Naked Truth”. As part of the performance, she invited the audience to sign her naked body, creating a human petition against Brexit. Victoria also made a series of naked appearances - on the same theme - on TV and radio, including:

• Good Morning Britain, ITV

• The Today programme, Radio 4 (also on Twitter)

Victoria’s naked performances have not been limited to Britain’s exit from the European Union. Freedom is the theme that ties together her protests against Brexit and her protests in favour of women’s right to be in charge of their own bodies.

In 2018, Victoria protested naked at the Royal Economic Society conference, to raise awareness of not only sexism in economics but, more specifically, economists’ neglect of issues relating to women’s bodies. She supplemented the acronym for the Royal Economic Society - “RES” - with the letters “PECT”, writing RES-PECT across her torso. In the same vein, she has also spoken at the UK Civil Service and the Office for National Statistics on the topic of feminism and economics. On these two occasions, she chose to deliver her talks clad only in banknotes, asking the audience to consider - quite literally - how, and to what extent, do economists value women?

Speaking to a much broader audience of non-economists, in the summer of 2019 Victoria appeared naked on stage at the Dartington Literary Festival to draw attention to the battleground that is women’s bodies, and in 2020, she delivered a naked performance at the Chester Diversity Festival for International Women’s Day.

Victoria argues that women’s bodily autonomy cannot be secured - and gender equality cannot be achieved - until the “cult of female modesty” is broken, and that that requires change both outside and inside feminism.