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

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

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

His circumlocutions display the necessity of distance from the body’s dark needs, impoverishing architectural theory and architecture itself, in Penner’s view.

ongoing anxiety of contaminating scholarly endeavor with intellectual discourse on bodily elimination and the artifacts through which it operates.

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.

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

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.

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

Douglas engages with dirt as an extensive metaphor for anything that is symbolically polluting because it threatens established sociocultural categories,