There’s an outfit we wear everyday. It moves with us, holds us together, changes colour and texture, tells stories whether from healed scars or the needling of ink. It peels and renews, cools us down when it’s hot, and blisters when it’s burnt. For the human body’s largest organ, our skin gets less credit than it deserves. Yet it’s heavily coded with meanings of gender, race, sexuality and religion. 

Julia Mage'au Gray, a Papuan and Mekeo skin marker (tattooist), says skin is a canvas, marking various life transitions. In Pacific cultures, she says, “we as a collective, also use our skin as a visual language to denote status, wealth, connection and strength.”

“To show or not to show, I personally feel, it is up to the individual and what they are comfortable with. Depending on the types of marks, wearing old cultural marks shifts you into a role of being an ambassador and this comes with responsibility and accountability to your family, your clan, your village, and your culture.

“More contemporary markings have a multitude of reasons for the individual centred around heritage, transition, and expression. For example, marks have a function in cultural ceremonies, and an individual may feel to honour this and respect cultural protocols, it may not be appropriate to reveal their marks on a public level.” 
Gray said showing skin and its marks can be seen as two different acts. “One can be deemed as sinful and the other as ‘mana’ full.”

The sin of skin

‍Gray notes, “colonisation and the introduction of new belief systems has altered the relationship Pacific people have with their bodies. Wearing marks today is an act of resistance as it is honouring and celebrating the continuance of our cultures.”

She said introduced religions such as Christianity have changed indigenous relationships and ways of thinking about the body. “For example, covering up as showing skin is deemed to be immoral and even seen as being promiscuous, especially for women.” 

The ‘sinful’ is something that members of Canterbury’s Pineglades Naturist Club often feel is misplaced on their community. The club in Rolleston gives people from any walk of life the opportunity to roam in a state of undress. “Naturism is living in harmony with naturing, practising respect for others through the practice of social nudity,” explained one member. 

He said the practice was often misconceived as something sexual in nature. “Our club is a family-oriented club where it is safe to be clothes free.” For him, clothing acts as a practical thing to keep the body warm, otherwise it becomes a hindrance for activities like swimming, bike riding and sports.

“Naturism has improved my confidence greatly,” he said. “The exceptional thing about naturism is that we are all people of different shapes, sizes, proportions and ages but we are all people and this environment fosters good relationships without a facade.”

A woman added that sometimes people think they are a kind of cult. “We have jobs like everybody else in the world.” Before practising naturism, she didn’t like people seeing her naked. Social nudity has enabled her to walk around everywhere and be treated as if she were clothed. Another member says she enjoys the feeling of freedom without clothes: “the feeling of sun, wind, water on your whole body.” 

Loving the skin, loving the body

For some, embracing skin has meant embracing the body as a whole. Amita Kala, who is unapologetically fat and brown, calls this body acceptance. “I feel like it’s more just being neutral.”

After her separation from a long term relationship at the age of 30, she realised her perception of a relationship was “for external validation because I’ve lived in a fat body.” She began looking deeper into this need and her resignation to the male gaze in therapy. 

At the start of this journey she began tattooing herself. “I see it as how we adorn gods and how we dress them up and do these rituals.” She also established a skincare routine to do every single night. “The intention is taking time to touch yourself in a way that you’re giving yourself love and looking after yourself.”

“We can care about ourselves, and we can care about other people at the same time. Just because you love yourself doesn’t mean you love other people less.”

In a therapy session Kala did on Zoom, she and her therapist turned off their cameras and Kala was talked through setting up a mirror in front of her and getting naked. “And then I had to look at myself, really just look at myself.”

“It’s so vulnerable to be naked and so just spending time creating that safety within myself being naked and allowing and noticing what comes up is a great thing that I would suggest to people.”

Over time, the word ‘fat’ has become “way less loaded.” She said the old programming can still exist, but it’s about noticing it and then letting it pass. “Before, I would be like ‘oh my gosh, I look fat. Therefore this means I’m unworthy, I’m unlovable, I’m gross, I’m smelly, I’m lazy.’”

“I think about Jillian Michaels all the time because it was so normalised to talk to another human like that.” The narrative had made Kala feel like she needed to be ‘the funny friend’ as it would distract people from her fatness.

Fat is now a descriptor – a fact. “It’s like saying I’m Gujarati,” says Kala. “This is part of the process of retraining what we perceive as the beauty standard.” Kala says it’s thanks to the queer community who planted these seeds. She began attending vogue balls in 2017 and was inspired by the drag queens’ “pure, unapologetic self love” and was “magnetised by their confidence.”

Breasts and the body as positionality

‍Exposed breasts remain normal in many indigenous societies, yet in Aotearoa, this culture has been trumped by social norms. It’s not illegal to be naked in public so long as the display doesn’t “intentionally and obscenely” expose genitals, according to the Indecent Exposure section of the Offences Act 1981. 

In her doctoral thesis Hine! E Hine!, Aroha Yates-Smith, known for her research into forgotten Māori female deities, wrote about how Christianity, the Victorian ethos and the European education system had changed the traditional Māori belief system dramatically, rendering women in Māori society more invisible and powerless.

Traditionally the ūkaipō, symbolised by the breast, and the whare tangata, symbolised by the uterus, referred to a person’s capacity as a nurturer and a bringer of life into te ao mārama, the world of light, where all things have come to flourish. Ūkaipō, literally the breast which feeds at night, refers to a greater place where humans turn to for sanctuary, nurturing, and restoration. The whare tangata is the home of humankind, created from Papatūānuku, a foundational deity.

Words like whenua meaning both land and afterbirth, and hapū as pregnant and kinship group, indicate the tapu and collectively spiritual nature of the female body. Ūkaipō and te whare tangata, in this view, is a positionality for Māori women rather than a biology.

Yates-Smith said the devalusing of the feminine and traditional spiritualities has destabilised the spiritual significance of these positionalities. Now the word ‘topless’ comes with lewd, sexual connotations, ikura (periods) deemed unsanitary, and childbirth was, and often still is, heavily medicalised, hospitalised. All this plays a part in framing the female biology as a deficit, or as something belonging to, or needing the salvation of another.

Reframing 

Kala used to be a fashion stylist - “My entire portfolio was thin white women." - and now she’s signing herself up to be a plus-sized model. “Realising that I can be my own representation was huge.” In the past, she had used Facetune on her photos. “Even though I was creating my own representation by posting online, it was a false representation.”

She’s also changed who she follows on social media, making sure she follows people who look like her. Coming from the marketing-heavy fashion industry, she knows the strategies of selling and branding. “I used my power to sell jackets, and now I use my power to sell community. It's the same tools, marketing and understanding psychology, but shifting the message. 

These days, when Kala looks at herself in the mirror, she says, “I can’t help but see a goddess in every single angle.” 

It’s not that it is necessarily sexual. In fact she’d been worried for a long time that her natural body was overtly sexual, wearing minimisers and sports bras so her breasts wouldn’t jiggle. But now they are free to. For Kala, the body is divine, and her skin is an adornment of it whether she chooses to show it or not. “Even when I’m wearing a turtleneck and long sleeves, I’m still a goddess.”