Bill Kirkpatrick: It Beats Rocks and Tear Gas (p. 4)
Streaking and the Politics of Nostalgia
While streakers were reterritorializing the campus for white masculinity, mainstream observers were reterritorializing the "campus"—the symbolic role of the university as a social space—for the politics of nostalgia. But whereas student streakers could fall back on their student status in order to construct streaking as a harmless prank, sustaining that construction in the broader public debate required much more discursive labor. In particular, streaking was potentially threatening not just for any political articulation but also for its generic similarity to exhibitionism and flashing. For society at large, streaking had to be emptied of any potential sexual and criminal threat if it was to be considered a harmless prank.
Even in the relatively liberated days of the early 1970s, nudity produced enormous social anxiety, so it is unsurprising that defenders of streaking worked to erase this sexual threat. The commentator who contrasted this "innocent" youthful sexual exuberance with "perverted" adult sexual exuberance has already been mentioned; this distinction was repeated countless times by students and social observers alike. For example, the New York Times quoted one student claiming, "There's nothing sensuous or freaky about streaking," while a psychiatrist added, "[It's] more naughty than sexual" (Malcolm 49, McFadden 41.) Dr. Joyce Brothers agreed that "there's nothing at all sexual about streaking," while the Christian Century reasoned that "the speed of the streaker rules out the motive of exhibitionism" (“Streaking as Praxis” 310, "Streaking: One Way” 42). Despite this effort to desexualize streaking, its sexual aspect could not be entirely erased; instead, it was mocked. Commentators and authority figures who saw a sexual threat in streaking were roundly ridiculed as "moralists" and "bluenoses," while most press accounts included at least one pun or witticism that blunted streaking's erotic potential ("In Praise" 8, "Streaking: One Way” 42). For example, the New York Times wrote, "Suddenly a naked body is running at you, and just as suddenly it is gone. As one coed put it, 'You don't have time to look at the face too'" (Malcolm 49). Some even turned the sexual threat around: streakers were young innocents, and those who attempted to repress them were the ones with the sexual hang-ups. For instance, a student poem entitled "Vice Figure" spoke of the "horny administrator" cracking down on streaking and linked police pursuit with perversion, shifting the deviance from the naked bodies to those who would apprehend them (Peary 6).
This desexualization of streaking allowed observers to see the phenomenon as a return to a "normal," natural state of youthful innocence. Streaking was "the new spring rite," perhaps vaguely naughty but not really dirty—just young naïfs cavorting without reason (McFadden 35). As the New York Times saw it, streakers were not sprinting across the quad; they were "gamboling across the country, fueled by a certain annual spring silliness" (Malcolm 49). One commentator linked streaking to Dionysian and Bacchanalian rites, arguing that "students [will] be especially stirred by spring. Their youth, exuberance, and energy tend to make them more strongly responsive to changes in nature than their elders, who are likely to celebrate spring with a spate of tennis, golf, gardening, or even bird watching" (Toolan 152). Furthermore, there was perceived to be something particularly "American" in the practice, and this trope slid easily into a generalized sense of national renewal as Americans "half-mad with hunger" for the "Age of Innocence" saw in streaking youthful innocence and spiritual rebirth. Newsweek wrote that "all seemed to agree that streaking was the sort of totally absurd phenomenon the nation needed after a winter of lousy news." Time added at the end of March, "What began as a tentative titter at the edge of the national awareness has become one great, good-natured American guffaw" (“In Praise” 8), while the National Review wrote, "Nixon may be impeached, England may sink beneath the waves … and Mailer is writing another book—but almost anything can be borne if people start laughing again" (“The Streaker: Faster than the…” 362). Unlike those angry, violent, long-haired peace agitators, much less those angry, violent blacks and feminists, "non-political" white male streakers were celebrated as the antidote to America's national blues, or at least a welcome distraction from them. For example, Time reassured its readers that streaking could help heal the nation's crisis without involving anything like a political point:
[Streaking] could hardly have come at a better time. The U.S., too long assailed by inflation, shortages and Watergate, sorely needed a diversion. Combatting the sour mood was scarcely behind the students' exuberant rush to take it off; students have never really needed much of a reason to cavort beyond the incandescent mix of youth, health and spring. (“In Praise” 8)
It is perhaps understandable that students would claim innocence for streaking and that campus administrators would collaborate in that act, but the enthusiastic society-wide effort to reterritorialize the symbolic campus as a site of national rebirth requires a closer look. Indeed, it was the rhetorical move of articulating streaking to the prelapsarian innocence of the imagined America of the 1950s that ultimately enlisted the now depoliticized, decriminalized, and desexualized practice into the service of a conservative politics of nostalgia. As noted above, countless observers drew parallels to such "innocent" 1950s activities as goldfish-swallowing and panty raids. Others posited a more general return to some of the "more naïve pleasures of the past, such as spring proms" (Toolan 157). Judith Martin in the Washington Post called streaking "a nostalgic trip back toward the '50s … a retreat from the '60s," and situated the phenomenon within a revival of fraternities, beer, 1950s music, and, again, proms (B1, B14). Conservative pundit George Will approvingly linked all these tropes—streaking, national renewal, American mythology, and 1950s innocence:
And who knows? Maybe these bumptious cheerful streakers will "bring us together" by bridging the generation gap: they could swallow fistfuls of goldfish and then streak into telephone booths. That is just what America needs to become a land fit for heroes: nostalgia buffs in the buff. (A27)
The dark side of this nostalgia for the 1950s has been explored by numerous scholars who have illustrated how the "norms" of the 1950s are used to delegitimize the various social struggles that came to the fore in the late 1950s and the 1960s. In the case of streaking, this "return to normalcy" was clearly predicated on the primacy of white masculinity. For example, one social scientist, concerned to establish streakers' normalcy, defined the "typical" streaker:
Is he a devious deviant, an uncloseted exhibitionist, a playful pervert, a dangerous psychopath or disturbed and immature adolescent, or perhaps none of these? He is tall (5'11") and weighs 170 pounds. He is a Protestant. … He is described as nice-looking, … and comes from a small town (under 50,000 in population). His mother is a housewife and his father a business or professional man. (Heckel 146)
The streaker's normalcy—his whiteness, maleness, youthfulness, middle-classness, and supposedly apolitical nostalgia for the innocence of 1950s America before feminism and civil rights—made him the ideal representative of the status quo ante. The many commentators contrasting streakers with 1960s protesters throw this construction into even sharper relief. For example, Time distinguished streaking from more threatening student activity when it claimed that "folks are simply grateful that students are no longer rioting or building bombs" (“In Praise” 8). The New York Times wrote that streaking had led to "generally favorable comparisons with some more violent campus demonstrations of the nineteen-sixties" (Malcolm 49). Even the conservative National Review bent over backwards to legitimate streaking:
The spirit of the thing is entirely different from the defiant nudity and even public sexual intercourse seen in places like Berkeley during the later 1960s. That was political and nihilistic in motive, the participants going all out for Ho and Mao. The streaker, in contrast, is a humorist, a reliever of tensions. (“The Streaker: Faster than the…” 362)
Streakers "relieved" tensions, unlike left-wing student activists who, apparently, produced them. The frequency with which observers reached for this contrast indicates an urgency to the interpretation of streaking as a turning away from the activism of the '60s, thereby helping to redefine the university as an institution less threatening to the hegemonic social order. One of the few observers at the time who grasped the importance of "non-political" white masculinity to the construction of streaking as "harmless" put it:
[That's] why streakers don't get busted. Streaking's … not directed against entrenched power. Just them kids having a good time. … If we had "Streakers for Socialism" on Wall Street, or "Asses for Ecology" streaking General Motors, or blacks streaking George Wallace with "SEX!" painted in DayGlo on their protruding places, there'd be a lot of naked people in jail. (Cloud 4)
With streaking established as a return to normalcy—at least as long as it was performed by white males and contained on college campuses—observers were able to rearticulate the role of the campus in the American imagination. No longer need it represent the primary site and source of the Generation Gap, identity politics, and ignominious military defeat; no longer need it be associated with long hair, sexual licentiousness, and angry blacks and women demanding a new curriculum. Now the university—as reterritorialized by streakers—could at least provisionally function as a less threatening, less destabilizing, more "American" social space. In other words, through streaking the campus became a site of temporary backlash—against leftist politics, against the feminist movement, against the civil rights movement. Streaking may have only briefly reclaimed the American university for white patriarchy, but it would be a mistake to dismiss it because of this brevity. As we have witnessed in the years since, reactionary conservatives have mounted a decades-long project to mobilize the politics of nostalgia in the service of neoconservative economic and social policies, and have consistently and repeatedly attacked the academy for its supposed liberal bias; streaking was one early moment in this struggle. In that light, it is unsurprising that conservatives like George Will and the National Review became such eager apologists for streaking, since streaking waged for them a cultural skirmish in an ongoing political war.
Conclusion
In 1969, a group of female students at Grinnell staged a 'nude-in' to protest a speaker from Playboy who was on campus to discuss "The Playboy Philosophy." They stripped off their clothes, and when they demanded that the speaker also take off his clothes, he fled. Eight of the group were convicted of indecent exposure; as the Iowa attorney general's office said at the time, "You can't have people running around stripping off their clothes for any reason" (Cloud 4).
Five years later, a writer to the Daily Iowan, Burns H. Weston, lamented that, while he didn't have a problem with streaking per se, "A few short years ago, our campus and city police saw more obscenity in principled protest than they now see in 'streaking,' and proved the point with arrest and mace and jail. What has happened? What are our values?" (Weston 4).
This article attempts to answer Mr. Weston's question. The values that mainstream society asserted—as Weston well suspected—were those of an imagined status quo ante: an innocent America structured by white patriarchy. In 1974, the construction of streaking worked to reterritorialize the university following an era of radical protest and in the face of challenges from women and people of color. Luckily for the academy and American society, progressive initiatives such as Women's Studies and African-American Studies departments would continue to thrive and be the source of extraordinary accomplishments. Nonetheless, the larger political project of which this episode was a part was largely successful: the discourses surrounding streaking reveal the ease with which radical and leftist voices could be positioned as oppositional to cherished American myths, and even a casual student of American history will quickly grasp that this is a recurring theme that remains with us today. In that light, streaking was neither the beginning of that project nor its most significant or lasting aspect, but rather a brief moment of high visibility for broader political struggles that were ultimately far from trivial. Perhaps revisiting "harmless fads" will encourage us to pay better attention to the inexhaustible means by which potential resistance is contained, repressed, or marginalized, and the social configurations in which and through which these processes occur.
Note:
This paper is provided under a Creative Commons for-attribution, non-commercial, share-alike license. For all other uses, contact the author at mwkirkpa@gmail.com. The article will be appearing in the Journal of Popular Culture in 2008.
Please cite as:
Kirkpatrick, Bill. "'It Beats Rocks and Tear Gas': Streaking and Cultural Politics in the Post-Vietnam Era." Journal of Popular Culture (forthcoming, 2008).
Download a copy of the article as a Word document here.