The entangled war faces of Naked Women: living with the invocation of antimonies, absurdities, conflicts, contradictions, and incongruities

This paper is a gathering together of the conflicts threaded into the lives that we live as transformative university educators. We have both resistance and willingness to explore such processes of selving, and so draw on the embodied ethnographies of our academic colleagues across different decades and contexts to do so (e.g. Leitch 2006, Ortega, 2023). Aware of the complexities and potential triggering of the phrase ‘Naked Women’ (NW), we use it nonetheless and question what being a Naked Woman (NW) means and what it means to be a Naked Women (NW). Caught between inner wars and outer oppression, NW have and hold access to an anchoring force sourced from a power of authenticity but are weighed heavily by it. In elite, well-clothed, and mask-wearing spaces the presence of NW annoys, irritates, and offends. In these elite arenas, NW become objects of vitriol, symbolic aggression, symbolic violence and/or are used for titillation and tokenism. Above all, they are considered to be so disposable, to be used until they are done, that there is not a hint of sustenance, maintenance, or restoration. So, the War Face of the Naked Woman comes to be. You know the War Faces of the Naked Woman by her doings. Her choice is to not follow the ‘rules of the game’ despite knowing that it will cost her. She is called naïve, stupid, unwise, self-sabotaging, incapable of self- control, but resists these narratives and anchors her power forward. With neither a confessional nor singular stance, we examine the conflicts of the entangled War Faces of Naked Women because we want to prepare the ground for new methods and ways of growing radical transformative agency. Diffracting the conflictual motives with(in) our disciplines and across our contemporary workplaces further emboldens our praxis for equitable action on pressing social needs.