bikinis and other s/pacific n/oceans

Abstract

This paper addresses tourist and militarist notions of the Pacific by discussing the bikini bathing suit and its connection to nuclear testing. The paper begins with an account of nuclear testing on Pacific islarids, focusing longest on Bikini Atoll, and ends with a description of the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific movement. The body of the paper is a discussion of the politics of the bikini bathing suit in terms of what it simultaneously reveals and conceals. The bikini reveals the female body in order to depoliticize it and symbolically conceals the bodies of Pacific Islanders in order to depoliticize them. Feminist, psychoanalytic, and Marxist theories are used to argue that the bikini both commodifies a nasty colonial reality and appropriates the female body to divert attention from the indigenous decolonizing efforts. However, while the bikini was created to celebrate nuclear power, s/pacific bodies have survived in spite of nuclear destruction and continue to resist tourist and militarist notions of who they should be.