Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing (NYU Series in Social and Cultural Analysis Book 1)

To paraphrase Marx, many women are suffering from false toilet consciousness.

With its blanket presumption of irresponsibility, the infrared faucet doesn’t merely respond to this fact, it installs it, giving it the status of normalcy. There is a kind of infantilization at work, and it offends the spirited personality.45

In this example, then, the surveilled population has managed to alter the terms of the disciplining process and, in effect, to challenge the status of the automated washroom as an omniscient authoritarian. The nonhuman artifact, in this instance the adjusted flushometer, displays Foucault’s technology of the gaze, but only imperfectly executed. Use

Public toilets invite us to consume the signs of cleanliness, which usually have little to do with actual cleanliness or health.

Surely fear of “the prewarmed seat”36 is less a rationally grounded fear of infection than a fear of the touch of the stranger, the Other who is so like us as to share our bodily shape and our bodily needs but who is unknown to us and therefore potentially contaminating.

new social values produce new psychic structures and bodily responses (such as visceral experiences of disgust) and ultimately new rational, “scientific” justifications.

Public toilets thus separate private, “natural” functions from public, social ones—indeed, in so doing, they actively constitute our idea of the natural and the social.

most literal and entrenched social division—the division of people into two unchanging sexes. This form of segregation is at once immensely naturalized and immensely policed, the most taken-for-granted social categorization and the most fiercely regulated.

The sealed-off body requires sealed-off spaces in which to unloose itself—and yet sealed-off spaces themselves generate fears.