Description
Book SynopsisTalking about toilets--in all their material, social, symbolic and discursive complexity
Trade Review"Thoughtful analysis of the place of toilets in modern culture and psyche has often been as hard to find as a decent public convenience in any major Western city. Ladies and Gents is a timely and educational addition to the unheralded and hitherto sorely neglected field of toilet studies."
—Rose George, author of The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters
Table of ContentsForeword
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Private Life of Public Conveniences
Potty Politics: Toilets, Gender, and Identity
1. The Role of the Public Toilet in Civic Life
2. Potty Privileging in Perspective: Gender and Family Issues in Toilet Design
3. Geographies of Danger: School Toilets in Sub-Saharan Africa
4. Gender, Respectability, and Public Convenience in Melbourne, Australia, 1859–1902
5. Bodily Privacy, Toilets, and Sex Discrimination: The Problem of “Manhood” in a Women’s Prison
6. Colonial Visions of “Third World” Toilets: A Nineteenth-Century Discourse That Haunts Contemporary Tourism
7. Avoidance: On Some Euphemisms for the “Smallest Room”
Toilet Art: Design and Cultural Representations
8. Were Our Customs Really Beautiful? Designing Refugee Camp Toilets
9. (Re)Designing the “Unmentionable”: Female Toilets in the Twentieth Century
10. Marcel Duchamp’s Legacy: Aesthetics, Gender, and National Identity in the Toilet
11. Toilet Training: Sarah Lucas’s Toilets and the Transmogrification of the Body
12. Stalls between Walls: Segregated Sexed Spaces
13. “Our Little Secrets”: A Pakistani Artist Explores the Shame and Pride of Her Community’s Bathroom Practices
14. In the Men’s Room: Death and Derision in Cinematic Toilets
15. “White Tiles. Trickling Water. A Man!” Literary Representations of Cottaging in London
16. The Jew on the Loo: The Toilet in Jewish Popular Culture, Memory, and Imagination
Afterword
Contributors
Index
