Potty Training: Nonhuman Inspection in Public Washrooms
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Description
Published as Chapter 4 in Toilet : Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing, Harvey Molotch & Laura Noren, eds.
The intimacies, privacies, and taboos of the public washroom render it almost inaccessible for direct human inspection. Especially with the decline of attendants and thus loss of a human policeman, nonhuman fixtures are set in place to do the dirty work. Moreover, in the United States, or at least in Buffalo, New York, where I have done fieldwork (and which is typical of American cities in these respects), government officials make only rare appearances on the toilet scene. Consequently, washroom inspection mostly takes place through the design of automated fixtures. Instead of placing a human policeman to make sure that the user flushes after every use – which might constitute an illegal, immoral, and also economically impractical act in the context of the public washroom – a nonhuman thing performs the task. Automated flushing, rinsing, soaping, and drying devices – and recently also automated doors – are the authorities. This spatially mandated public hygiene constitutes morality in practice, one that doesn’t always resonate well with the public. Perhaps unsurprisingly, various forms of human resistance to these impositions have mushroomed here and there: acts of vandalism directed at automated fixtures, their routine avoidance, or strategies of finagling how they operate.
Publication Date
2010
Publisher
New York University Press
City
New York
ISBN
9780814795880
First Page
65
Last Page
86
Disciplines
Anthropology | Social and Cultural Anthropology | Sociology
Recommended Citation
Irus Braverman, Potty Training: Nonhuman Inspection in Public Washrooms in Toilet : Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing (Harvey Molotch & Laura Noren, eds., New York University Press 2010).
Comments
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