Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing

2. Dirty Spaces: Separation, Concealment, and Shame in the Public Toilet

25 2 Dirty Spaces Separation, Concealment, and Shame in the Public Toilet Ruth Barcan I STA RT F R O M the general proposition that architecture is “an art which directly engages the body,”1 an art that must deal in concrete, literally , with often abstract or hidden social and cultural logics. My second starting point is the well-known work of the cultural anthropologist Mary Douglas on dirt. Douglas engages with dirt as an extensive metaphor for anything that is symbolically polluting because it threatens established sociocultural categories, such as the division between male and female, human and animal, public and private. Dirt is an “offense against order,” against the categories that help promote social stability .2 It is, therefore, that which a society feels it needs to eliminate, conceal, or purify in order to preserve order. Sounds, smells, sights, objects , or even people that cross boundaries threaten the purity of social categories and are causes of psychological and social unease. The body has a special symbolic role in this social ordering, since it is “a source of symbols for other complex structures”3 and “a reliably constant source of pollution.”4 Bodily waste is an obvious and potent form of dirt thus understood, since its potential for contamination conjoins the literal and the symbolic. This makes even the cleanest of public toilets, culturally speaking, a “dirty space.” Culturally dirty spaces such as toilets produce a host of practical problems and dilemmas for architects, designers , planners, and regulators, since it is hard, if not impossible, to design a single site that can accommodate their ambiguity. There is probably no single space that will meet the often conflicting needs of 26 Ruth Barcan different social groups, since there is no easy conformity either in principle or in concrete about what will make all people feel comfortable and safe. For this reason, public toilets are inevitably contested spaces. So public toilets are not only ambiguous spaces and contested spaces, all the more so they are also multiple spaces, in the sense that they house many needs and practices. They are places for excretion and defecation, for restoring one’s social face (doing one’s hair or makeup), or for changing one’s clothes. They are places for washing and also, for some, quasi-medical spaces (changing a colostomy bag or injecting insulin or taking medication).5 The homeless may use them as shelter; they may be used for masturbation, drug use, or sex. Our encounter with a public toilet is thus an encounter with a host of others, as we interact on a daily basis with people who may be quite different from us but who share at least some of our bodily needs. It is an encounter too with the ghosts and shadows of the mostly unseen users who have preceded us and who will take our place. For that reason, the objects contained within a public toilet—the toilet seat, the clock, the tap, the urinal, the mirror—are especially charged with meaning and often serve as proxies for the unknown others who use the space. Public toilets are thus places where we meet members of the public and where we interact with, and continually reproduce, an idea of the public.6 My argument is underpinned by two metaphors: the spatial metaphor of the boundary and the metaphorical cluster around dirt (contamination , contagion, pollution, and purification). The two metaphors intersect, since the function of boundaries is, precisely, to prevent the spread of dirt (literal or symbolic) by demarcating, dividing, and separating people, places, and objects whose proximity might otherwise be troubling. Like all metaphors, those of boundaries and dirt are not just abstract symbols but, to paraphrase George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s famous formulation, ideas we live by.7 At once abstract and literal, they are instantiated and brought to life in a host of everyday attitudes, beliefs, habits, and encounters, as well as in more overt forms of social regulation such as planning codes and obscenity laws. The mundane business of doing one’s business in public is thus at once habitual and deeply meaningful, an embodiment of broader and deeper cultural logics. Dirty Spaces 27 The logic I’m investigating here is that of hygiene, understood as simultaneously a literal and a symbolic matter. The sociologist Norbert Elias argues in his classic study The Civilizing Process that scientific or rational arguments, in particular those...