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

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

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

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

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.

ideas such as liberalism, equality, and access are gendered to their core, involving complex and differential implications for men, women, and those of other gender identities.

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.

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

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.