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1 1 Introduction Learning from the Loo Harvey Molotch P U B L I C A N D TO I L ET do not sit well together. The discord goes beyond words. Using the facility—let’s call it that for now—involves intensely private acts. Focusing on the public restroom, as the contributors to this book make it their business to do, thus opens a tense domain . But it is a route worth taking, precisely because of the shadow under which it normally falls. By going there, we have the potential to make discoveries with implications for personal hygiene, psychological stress, and social betterment. We can also learn about power and the capacity to shape others’ life chances. Hence a group of scholars, drawn from the diverse disciplines of sociology, anthropology, law, architecture , archaeology, history, gender studies, and cultural studies, conjoin to face the facts, unpleasant or otherwise, of the loo. Even the home bathroom can unleash embarrassment, shame, or criticism when family members detect by sight, sound, or scent what one another are up to. Places such as restaurants or shopping centers introduce anonymity (often welcome) but also concerns about having to share intimate space with people whose intrusions may make us anxious and from whom we want to keep our intimacies separate. The person in the next stall may be the boss or a rival co-worker. The open-to-all facility, as in a public park or train station, invites its own range of anxieties—a person of filth or stranger ready to attack. So here we have the problem at hand: the toilet involves doing the private in public and under conditions only loosely under the control of the actors involved. By using this tension as springboard, we open 2 Harvey Molotch up larger issues of what people think they need to protect, how they go about securing that protection, and who succeeds and who does not. We examine the forces that organize such accomplishment and failure—how neighborhoods, cities, cultures, and nations provide for some and not for others. Put bluntly, peeing is political, and so is taking a shit and washing up. We use the word toilet inclusively, calling on its French connotation, to cover people’s acts of intimate caring to keep themselves decently competent and without bodily offense. The toilet is a foundational start point where each of us deals directly with our bodies and confronts whatever it provides, often on a schedule not of our own making. The animal in us comes to the fore, and we must accommodate to its tendencies and demands. It is “bare life,” as it surfaces in social existence.1 When we are away from home, we must use some variant of public provision to civilize and prepare for the social world to follow. When on the road, it becomes the ultimate “backstage” of life (in Erving Goffman’s famous term)—where we set up our “presentation of self.” And when we are readying that performance, it becomes truly important who knows what we are up to and just how they know it. It also matters what precisely we have to work with when we prepare. Without adequacy in these regards, we are almost literally nothing in this world. There are the material practicalities. How far away is the facility? Is it clean and clean in the sense that matters to me? Do I have access by right? By money? By force? Will there be a proper Western toilet on which I can sit, or will I have to squat? If I am from a squatting part of the world, must I risk physical contact with a public appliance? Toilet paper must be present for an American or European. For an Indian in India, water through a wash pipe that can be directed toward anus or vulva is the utter necessity. Will there be paper covers I can put on the toilet seat, or must I—as women often do in the United States— hover over the seat rather than make the physical contact? And if I lack the muscles to hover, will the waste deposited by prior hoverers with poor aim have been cleaned away by some others (and just whom?) or be a basis for subsequent filth and cringe-worthy horror? Even within the rich parts of the world, toilet suffering occurs. People in poor neighborhoods have fewer places to go, in part due to lower [3.140.186.241] Project MUSE (2024...

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