Little Vast Rooms of Undoing: Exploring Identity and Embodiment through Public Toilet Spaces

Dara Blumenthal

doi:10.5771/9781783480364

Summary

Public toilets are places where individual identity is put to the test through experiences of fear, anxiety, shame, and embarrassment, yet also places where we shore up, confirm, and check the status of our gendered identities. In these highly gendered and sex-segregated places, people of various and varied identities come together and separately conduct their ‘business’ through socially contingent toileting habits and behaviors.

Based on empirical research with men, women, gender non-conforming, and trans individuals who have a range of sexual identities, Little Vast Rooms of Undoing attempts to understand a nearly universal aspect of daily life in the contemporary West.

Through a meditation on socially dictated practices and their associated emotions, it argues that experiences within public toilets expose the fissures of individual identity construction and understanding and opening the possibilities for a more relational and cohesive experience of the embodied self.

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Bibliographic data

Edition: 1/2014
Copyright year: 2014
ISBN-Print: 978-1-78348-035-7
ISBN-Online: 978-1-78348-036-4
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham
Language: English
Pages: 213
Product type: Book Titles

1. Contents No access
2. Acknowledgements No access
3. Being (Beyond) Oneself No access
1. 1 Homo Clausus and the Western Philosophical Tradition No access
2. 2 Homines Aperti and Post-Structuralism No access
3. 3 Corpus Infinitum and Posthumanism No access
1. 4 The History of Western Public Toilets since the Fifteenth Century No access
1. 5 Homo Clausus and The Normative Intra-Action Order of Public Toilets No access
2. Tiny Blast No access
1. Modern Adventures at Sea No access
2. 7 Corpus Infinitum and the Materiality of Possibility No access
1. Conclusion: Towards a New Ethics of Being No access
2. Epilogue: “and in a sense, that is my journey to shit too.” No access
Bibliography No access Pages 203 - 206
Index No access Pages 207 - 212
About the Author No access Pages 213 - 213