Details

Little Vast Rooms of Undoing

Exploring Identity and Embodiment through Public Toilet Spaces

von: Dara Blumenthal
48,99 €
Verlag:	Rowman & Littlefield International
Format:	EPUB
Veröffentl.:	28.08.2014
ISBN/EAN:	9781783480364
Sprache:	englisch
Anzahl Seiten:	248

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Beschreibungen

Titelbeschreibung

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.

Titelkurzbeschreibung

Little Vast Rooms of Undoing explores the relationship between identity and embodiment in public toilet spaces.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: Being (Beyond) Oneself/Part I: The Dis-Embodiment of Identity/ 1. Homo Clausus and the Western Philosophical Tradition/ 2. Homines Aperti and Post-Structuralism/ 3. Corpus Infinitum and Posthumanism/ Part II: Individuating the Communal/ 4. The History of Western Public Toilets since the Fifteenth Century/ Part III: Theory as Practice/ 5. Homo Clausus and The Triadic Intra-Action Order/6. Homines Aperti and Matters of Care/ 7. Corpus Infinitum and the Materiality of Possibility/ Part IV: Entangling Ethics/ 8. Toward a New Ethics of Being/ 9. Epilogue: ‘and in a sense/ Works Cited/ Index

Autorenportrait

Dara Blumenthal is an interdisciplinary researcher and writer. She completed her BA at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University, before moving onto Doctoral research in Sociology, followed by an M.A. in Critical Theory at the University of Kent, UK. While at Kent she held Departmental Scholarships in the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research and the School of English.

Alternativtitel

Most books in this area have looked at toilets are concerned with sexual and social deviance, architecture and design, gender parity or access rights for gender non-conforming people. This book is the first to theoretically and empirically explore embodiment and materiality.
 

 
Sheila Cavanagh, Queering Bathrooms: Gender, Sexuality, and the Hygienic Imagination, University of Toronto Press, Nov 2010, $30.95 PB $51.10 cloth, 304pp 
 

 
Closest competitor in this space. This book aims to show how public toilets are experiences as threatening to non-normative people and advocates as redesigned space that allows greater visibility for those who find them threatening.Cavanagh’s understanding that public toilets are heteronormative spaces that need to be made more inclusive for queer bodies is based on the assumption that they are only experienced as oppressive, dangerous, and uncomfortable, via individual and independent queer identity. This book argues that these spaces are heteronormatizing spaces because they rely on homo clausus bodily fear, anxiety, shame and embarrassment as primary states of being for individual identity. In other words they are oppressive for all bodies regardless of desire or identity.
 

 

 
Edited by Gershenson and Penner, Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender, Temple University Press, 2009, $84.50, 262pp
 

 
Edited by Molotch and Noren, Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing (NYU Series in Social and Cultural Analysis), 2010, NYU Press, $71.10, 328pp
 

 
Ladies and Gents has two sets of essays dealing either with ‘potty politics’ or ‘toilet art’. Toilet is organized into three parts dealing with space and place, identity and access, and building and architecture. This book builds one some of the ideas explored in both edited collections but is far more focused on embodiment.

Sonderbeitrag

Uses the work of Peter Gizzi, an award-winning American poet, as a performative interruption to materialize the experiential-concepts of (de)territorialization and entanglement.