Toilet, Brooklyn 2005
Of the sterile cleanliness of Western toilets, white and tiled, [Jun’ichiro] Tanizaki writes “what need is there to remind us so forcefully of the issue of our own bodies [?]”
In the toilet Tanizaki imagines, the body disappears, is absorbed into the architecture and environment determined by the liminality of the toilet… In the toilet’s intimate space, the place where the body performs its most essential activities, the body is lost….
Akira Mizuta Lippit, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (2005)
In order to contextualize the long and sometimes fierce battle to provide public conveniences for women, I’ve been trying to learn more about how and where British women relieved themselves before lavatories became a feature of the Victorian streetscape. Such information is hard to come by…
Barbara Penner (author of ‘A World of Unmentionable Suffering: Women’s Public Conveniences in Victorian London’), ‘Researching Female Public Toilets: Gendered Spaces, Disciplinary Limits’ (2005)
