Naked Nation

The 1997 film The Full Monty had an unprecedented impact on British popular culture. Suddenly, “ordinary” men across Britain felt that taking their clothes off in public was not only possible but something to aspire to. This article examines the representation of the working-class male body in the film and its relationship to the (gendered) politics of looking. But there was much more at stake in The Full Monty than the state of individual masculine identities: the film made working-class male subjectivity available for appropriation for national purposes as both Prince Charles and Tony Blair used it as a vehicle for their own political ends. The working-class men in the film became convenient metaphors for an invigorated postimperial identity while preserving the status quo of British class divisions.