Underwear: A Theology
It hugs you and binds you and sometimes creeps up on you. You are not supposed to discuss it in public settings, and often it's embarrassing to have people notice it unless, by contrast, you want to show it off. I am talking, of course, about underwear.
Discussing underwear can seem trivial, even insignificant. Too small and unimportant compared, say, to the structures of space and time, the question of where experience begins and ends, and the nature of God. Or to the social, ecological, and political challenges we face. It is, after all, merely a layer of fabric that exists beneath the surface, rarely acknowledged in polite conversation. Less important, it seems, than our outer clothing, which functions in our lives as a marker of identity. However, this hesitancy reflects something deeper—a resistance to admitting our corporeality, the undeniable withness of our bodies.
This withness includes so much. It includes the pleasures of sensation, the capacities for movement, the enjoyment of health, and the suffering of disease. It includes the joys of intimacy and the pain of physical violence. And it includes the unavoidable realities of bodily function—sweat, excretion, and all the markers of physical existence we often seek to manage, conceal, or ignore. Underwear, in part, serves as a barrier between the body and the outer world, mediating issues of so-called filth and containment. It is an intimate reminder that we are organisms, not just minds floating freely in the world. To speak of underwear is to acknowledge these realities, to recognize that the self is not just an abstract identity but something bodily and, vis a vis our clothing, something felt, worn, and shaped by our bodies and our relationship to them.
Moreover, there is something uniquely human about it. Animals do not wear underwear. Plants do not wear it. Atoms do not wear it. And God, if imagined in a personal way, does not wear it. Thus, it reveals something about being human—something about our particular way of being in the world. Unlike animals, we do not simply exist within our bodies; we modify, adorn, and mediate them. Unlike plants, we do not grow seamlessly into our surroundings; we place barriers—some protective, some symbolic—between ourselves and the elements. Unlike atoms, we are not indifferent to exposure; we cultivate layers, both literal and metaphorical, to shape how we experience and present ourselves.
And if God, as imagined in many traditions, does not wear underwear, it may be because divine existence is not marked by the same tensions between concealment and exposure, between modesty and expression, between the intimate and the public. Open and relational theologians like to emphasize that God is a Spirit without a body of God's own. In this sense, God doesn't need underwear because there is nothing to conceal. At least nothing physical. Does this mean that God does not have a private side? I hope not.
A process theology of underwear begins with a recognition that our own way of being with our bodies is both private and public, and that relationality itself is likewise private and public. We who wear our undergarments have our own lives, our own subjective points of view, our own sufferings and joys, our own needs for secrecy and disclosure - and these needs are by no means reducible to the projections of others or to causal relations of objects in space. Our ways of being with our bodies are shaped by social conditions, but they are also private. Underwear reveals, and is a metaphor for, the private side of life.
At the same time it reveals, and is a metaphor for, the public side of life. Underwear is more than a fabric; it is a practice, a way of existing with ourselves and others. It signals comfort or discomfort, confidence or unease, conformity or defiance. It is shaped by culture, economy, and personal choice, reflecting both necessity and expression. This is true of all clothing, but underwear - undergarments - are especially revelatory of how the public side of life becomes a matter of private concern. In underwear the public becomes private and the private becomes public.
Process theology often speaks of God as a cosmic lure for goodness, truth, beauty, and vitality of experience within each actual entity, and also as a cosmic receptacle for the experiences of all actual entities. Actual entities transcend God in their own capacities for decision-making and yet they are immanent within God in that their experiences become part of God's own life. God feels their feelings and their feelings become part of God. Underwear reminds us that these "feelings" that are felt by God include bodily feelings, happy and sad, comforting and painful, erotic and platonic, satisfied and yearning, energetic, expansive and confined, soothing and aching, relaxed and restless, warm and chilled, secure and exposed - weary, tender, and raw. Underwear, as a constant yet often unnoticed companion to our bodily existence, embodies this full range of feeling.
To be sure, just as God feels the bodily sensations of all actual entities, God also feels the relational and symbolic dimensions of clothing—the social expectations it carries, the ways it marks identity, status, belonging, or exclusion. The excitement of dressing up, the burden of adhering to dress codes, the relief of slipping into something familiar—all of these enter into the divine life.
What is hidden to the world is present in God who is, says Whitehead, "a fellow sufferer who understands." There is an important sense in which, in our relation to God, we are always already unclothed, always already naked. And perhaps in which God, too, is naked to us. Not holding back, not hiding, but rather sharing in human experience: the whole of it, including the bodily side. We might like to say that God, compared to us, has no body, but it is also true that our own bodies, and those of all other creatures, are God's body. They help make God "God."
And yet, there is also something, perhaps a lot, that is hidden in God, and not at all visible or apparent to us. Part of it is what Whitehead calls "the primordial nature of God," That side of God which is non-temporal, which feels all that is potential; and which desires, indeed hungers, for their realization in due season. This side of God is not conscious until complemented by the consequent nature. When we gaze into the heavens on a starry night and sense a mystery within and beyond the stars, perhaps the "beyond" that we are sensing is this side of God. The heavens, in a strange way, lie between us and this mystery, both revealing and concealing it. If even the holiest of the holies, if even God, has undergarments, they are the stars themselves.
Discussing underwear can seem trivial, even insignificant. Too small and unimportant compared, say, to the structures of space and time, the question of where experience begins and ends, and the nature of God. Or to the social, ecological, and political challenges we face. It is, after all, merely a layer of fabric that exists beneath the surface, rarely acknowledged in polite conversation. Less important, it seems, than our outer clothing, which functions in our lives as a marker of identity. However, this hesitancy reflects something deeper—a resistance to admitting our corporeality, the undeniable withness of our bodies.
This withness includes so much. It includes the pleasures of sensation, the capacities for movement, the enjoyment of health, and the suffering of disease. It includes the joys of intimacy and the pain of physical violence. And it includes the unavoidable realities of bodily function—sweat, excretion, and all the markers of physical existence we often seek to manage, conceal, or ignore. Underwear, in part, serves as a barrier between the body and the outer world, mediating issues of so-called filth and containment. It is an intimate reminder that we are organisms, not just minds floating freely in the world. To speak of underwear is to acknowledge these realities, to recognize that the self is not just an abstract identity but something bodily and, vis a vis our clothing, something felt, worn, and shaped by our bodies and our relationship to them.
Moreover, there is something uniquely human about it. Animals do not wear underwear. Plants do not wear it. Atoms do not wear it. And God, if imagined in a personal way, does not wear it. Thus, it reveals something about being human—something about our particular way of being in the world. Unlike animals, we do not simply exist within our bodies; we modify, adorn, and mediate them. Unlike plants, we do not grow seamlessly into our surroundings; we place barriers—some protective, some symbolic—between ourselves and the elements. Unlike atoms, we are not indifferent to exposure; we cultivate layers, both literal and metaphorical, to shape how we experience and present ourselves.
And if God, as imagined in many traditions, does not wear underwear, it may be because divine existence is not marked by the same tensions between concealment and exposure, between modesty and expression, between the intimate and the public. Open and relational theologians like to emphasize that God is a Spirit without a body of God's own. In this sense, God doesn't need underwear because there is nothing to conceal. At least nothing physical. Does this mean that God does not have a private side? I hope not.
A process theology of underwear begins with a recognition that our own way of being with our bodies is both private and public, and that relationality itself is likewise private and public. We who wear our undergarments have our own lives, our own subjective points of view, our own sufferings and joys, our own needs for secrecy and disclosure - and these needs are by no means reducible to the projections of others or to causal relations of objects in space. Our ways of being with our bodies are shaped by social conditions, but they are also private. Underwear reveals, and is a metaphor for, the private side of life.
At the same time it reveals, and is a metaphor for, the public side of life. Underwear is more than a fabric; it is a practice, a way of existing with ourselves and others. It signals comfort or discomfort, confidence or unease, conformity or defiance. It is shaped by culture, economy, and personal choice, reflecting both necessity and expression. This is true of all clothing, but underwear - undergarments - are especially revelatory of how the public side of life becomes a matter of private concern. In underwear the public becomes private and the private becomes public.
Process theology often speaks of God as a cosmic lure for goodness, truth, beauty, and vitality of experience within each actual entity, and also as a cosmic receptacle for the experiences of all actual entities. Actual entities transcend God in their own capacities for decision-making and yet they are immanent within God in that their experiences become part of God's own life. God feels their feelings and their feelings become part of God. Underwear reminds us that these "feelings" that are felt by God include bodily feelings, happy and sad, comforting and painful, erotic and platonic, satisfied and yearning, energetic, expansive and confined, soothing and aching, relaxed and restless, warm and chilled, secure and exposed - weary, tender, and raw. Underwear, as a constant yet often unnoticed companion to our bodily existence, embodies this full range of feeling.
To be sure, just as God feels the bodily sensations of all actual entities, God also feels the relational and symbolic dimensions of clothing—the social expectations it carries, the ways it marks identity, status, belonging, or exclusion. The excitement of dressing up, the burden of adhering to dress codes, the relief of slipping into something familiar—all of these enter into the divine life.
What is hidden to the world is present in God who is, says Whitehead, "a fellow sufferer who understands." There is an important sense in which, in our relation to God, we are always already unclothed, always already naked. And perhaps in which God, too, is naked to us. Not holding back, not hiding, but rather sharing in human experience: the whole of it, including the bodily side. We might like to say that God, compared to us, has no body, but it is also true that our own bodies, and those of all other creatures, are God's body. They help make God "God."
And yet, there is also something, perhaps a lot, that is hidden in God, and not at all visible or apparent to us. Part of it is what Whitehead calls "the primordial nature of God," That side of God which is non-temporal, which feels all that is potential; and which desires, indeed hungers, for their realization in due season. This side of God is not conscious until complemented by the consequent nature. When we gaze into the heavens on a starry night and sense a mystery within and beyond the stars, perhaps the "beyond" that we are sensing is this side of God. The heavens, in a strange way, lie between us and this mystery, both revealing and concealing it. If even the holiest of the holies, if even God, has undergarments, they are the stars themselves.
The Sociology of Underwear
Laurie Taylor talks to Nina Edwards, the author of a new study which unravels the intimate narratives woven into the fabric of our most personal garments. Is there a profound and surprising significance to the garments we wear beneath our outer clothing? Also, Shaun Cole, Associate Professor in Fashion at the University of Southampton, considers the enduring question aimed at men over the choice of boxers or briefs and explores the future direction of men’s undergarments.
Producer: Jayne Egerto
Producer: Jayne Egerto
The Virtues of Underwear
Laced with illustrations of undergarments both prosaic and exotic, a global exposé of the hidden meaning of knickers, lingerie, and everything in between.
This book unravels the intimate narratives woven into the fabric of our most personal garments. From the first loincloths to the intricate layers of shapewear, the narrative explores the concealed world of underwear as a silent communicator of individual desire and societal affiliation. As an indicator of the pulse of fashion, underwear has evolved from minimalism to intricate designs with new materials. Beyond its role in denying our corporeal nature, underwear safeguards and exposes, reflecting our innermost desires and past experiences.
From clean underclothing resisting carnal urges to the protective embrace of fabric, this book illuminates the profound, often hidden stories told by the garments beneath our outer layers. It rewards the reader with historical insights into both women’s and men’s underwear and global cultures of dress.
This book unravels the intimate narratives woven into the fabric of our most personal garments. From the first loincloths to the intricate layers of shapewear, the narrative explores the concealed world of underwear as a silent communicator of individual desire and societal affiliation. As an indicator of the pulse of fashion, underwear has evolved from minimalism to intricate designs with new materials. Beyond its role in denying our corporeal nature, underwear safeguards and exposes, reflecting our innermost desires and past experiences.
From clean underclothing resisting carnal urges to the protective embrace of fabric, this book illuminates the profound, often hidden stories told by the garments beneath our outer layers. It rewards the reader with historical insights into both women’s and men’s underwear and global cultures of dress.