Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing by Harvey Molotch

Author:Harvey Molotch [Molotch, Harvey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780814795880
Amazon: 0814795889
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2010-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

It is a source of great inspiration and insight in the disability community that independent living, as well as inclusion within one’s community, should be the goal of education and habilitation of the disabled. But this ideal can also be a source of great disempowerment. … [The] focus on independence, and perhaps even on the goal of inclusion when inclusion is understood as the incorporation of the disabled into the “normal” life of the community, yields too much to a conception of the citizen as “independent and fully functioning.”21

Kittay repudiates the value placed on the linkage between “independent and fully functioning” and what can be socially productive and socially valuable citizenship. In so doing, she is in effect contesting the classical demarcation of a gendered female private sphere versus the male public sphere. Privileged access to a public toilet fuses with privilege, male and able-bodied, more generally. The disabled toilet, then, is that which collapses the private—that which is gendered as female, domestic, and altogether dependent—into the public sphere, so that the disabled toilet becomes a type of nonmale space that is conspicuously neither publicly male nor privately female. Although the disabled toilet was perhaps envisioned as a material embodiment of equal access and democratic equality, it also expresses, by its nature, the masculine principle that slippage of gendered difference risks display of weakness and dependence.

One aspect of male performativity is the use of urinals, themselves totems of masculinity. But for certain types of disability, use of the urinal becomes problematic, and this poses gender-identity difficulties as disabled men turn to toilets as urination receptacles. Hence a manual for health professionals and rehabilitation specialists published in the early 1980s counsels on the need to teach disabled men to sit on the commode for “both bowel movements and urination,” ensuring that it “avoids the difficulty that some handicapped men and boys have in aiming urine while standing so that it does not splash on the seat, floor, or clothing.”22 The task here, it seems, is how to give disabled men, and boys, the repertoire for performing bodily control, overcoming avoidance of a characteristically female toilet posture. Failing to build up men’s inner reserves would efface their distinction with women, destabilizing the historical male compulsion to demarcate and maintain the feminine private sphere as entirely separate from the masculine public sphere.

For all newly disabled people there are challenges in acquiring and mastering toilet skills. Men bring special baggage of not only their own immediate pragmatic goals but also gender-based dependency anxieties. These come into play in dealing with, as an adult, the most intimate bodily functions: how to raise and lower oneself from a wheelchair to a toilet seat, for instance, or how to wipe oneself while balancing on grab bars—and maintaining dignity. On a routine basis, an ambulant person who is visually impaired must negotiate the space of a public toilet alone and deal with problems such as paper-towel holders placed well outside one’s ordinary reach or toilet paper that has somehow gone missing from its usual location.

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