Flush With Ideology

Perhaps the easiest way to describe a sociotechnical view of the bathroom is to note that, just as turning on a tap plugs us into a ‘hard’ network of pipes and plants, it also plugs us into a ‘soft’ network made up of social attitudes and beliefs. This is (at least partially) what provocateur-theorist Slavoj Zizek had in mind when he asserted: ‘As soon as you flush the toilet, you’re in the middle of ideology.’ By this Zizek means that ideology follows us even into those spaces we consider separate from the outside world and that it shapes the equipment that we use so unthinkingly. He develops this theme further through graphic descriptions of the variations in toilet design in Germany (where excrement falls on to a ledge), France (where excrement falls straight down into the water) and America (where excrement falls into the water but floats). If, as modernist histories hold, technology is neutral and its form is purely determined by rational or functional considerations, then how do we account for such national variations? Zizek’s point is that they cannot be explained without referring to social factors, ideas, beliefs and habits, which are equally significant in determining design.

Chief among these social factors in Zizek’s account are ideas about health: the understanding of the causes of illness and the regimes adopted in order to prevent them (for instance, the reason German toilets have ledges is to allow stools to be inspected). At a collective level, Zizek is no doubt correct that evolving understandings of public health and fear of disease and contagion have been the most significant factor in bathroom provision and design. As is well understood, it was only as a result of devastating outbreaks of cholera and typhoid in the nineteenth century that governments began to take responsibility for sanitation and to fund the construction of sewers. And theories about hygiene have continued to influence the appearance and maintenance of the bathroom and its fittings. Just consider the shift in the early 1900s from the richly furnished bathroom of the Victorian period to the spare, white one, in order to better expose and eradicate dirt – and to symbolize a cultural commitment to doing so.

This last is a crucial point. For as the anthropologist Mary Douglas suggested in her seminal work Purity and Danger (1966), what we are doing when cleaning and decorating is ‘positively re-ordering our environment, making it conform to an idea’. It is surely not coincidence that Douglas introduces the ritualistic nature of domestic activities through a toilet anecdote: she describes her discomfort at using a friend’s bathroom that is perfectly clean but which occupies a corridor space. Contemplating the gardening tools and gumboots that share the space, Douglas notes: ‘It all made good sense as the scene of a back corridor, but as a bathroom – the impression destroyed repose.’ To her surprise, Douglas discovered that she was unsettled by the fact that the space didn’t much look like a bathroom, with a tiled floor and walls and smooth surfaces. The episode led her to conclude that bathroom decor and behaviours carry a heavy symbolic load: they reflect and express social ideas of purity and pollution.

It soon becomes apparent, however, that other ideas have exerted nearly as much power over bathroom design as have health, hygiene and purity, notably the emphasis in the West since the eighteenth century on bodily privacy. No less than the rise of the field of public health, privacy should be seen as a modern invention that decisively broke with attitudes towards the body that had prevailed for much of human history. Historically speaking, most bathing cultures have been public ones, and bathing complexes themselves have been important sites of sociability. The most famous public bathing culture was that of the ancient Romans, which was extended across their empire to Europe and North Africa, but it has been an integral feature of other civilizations as well. Think of Turkish hammans, Japanese sento bathhouses and onsen, and Finnish saunas. And European bathhouses and thermal baths continue to thrive, from venerable old establishments like Munich’s Müller’sches Volksbad to stunning new ones such as Therme Vals in Switzerland, designed by the architect Peter Zumthor.

bathroom history and evolution Peter Zumthor

Peter Zumthor, Therme Vals, Switzerland, 1994-7

The rise of privacy has resulted in the general privatization of Western bathing culture, though this did not happen evenly or all at once. Given that ‘private’ was increasingly equated with ‘exclusive’, it is not surprising that private and often very luxurious bathrooms first appeared in Europe in aristocratic or bourgeois homes. Until the 1920s, and sometimes well after that, rural or poor urban inhabitants were mostly left to carry on as before, with outhouses and communal privies (which were often sites of socializing), public bathhouses, showers and swimming pools. But privacy and related concerns about decency left their mark on these establishments, too. Communal privies were downsized and public baths were more rigorously subdivided to ensure the segregation of men from women and, with partitions, doors and cubicles, men from other men and women from other women.

Highly atomized bathing arrangements are now so naturalized throughout much of Europe and North America that we have trouble imagining them any other way. The ancient communal latrine still visible at Hadrian’s Wall, for instance, or even the two-seater privy in the garden of William Morris’s Kelmscott Manor in the Cotswolds seem quite alien to visitors who come upon them now – amusing curiosities from a distant past. But there are many parts of the world, such as Southeast Asia, India and Africa, where open or communal bathing and toileting arrangements remain the norm. These arrangements are often flagged up in travel guides and are regularly the subject of amazed commentary in travellers’ blogs. For better or worse, many travellers’ most memorable encounters with the Other – those moments when they feel their otherness most keenly – still take place in the bathroom.

Far from being straightforward pieces of technology, then, bathrooms are culturally determined and historically specific. Social factors like gender, class, race and religion influence their design and shape their use. Their arrangements directly reflect the dominant political ideology and its shifts: at the first sign of perestroika, for instance, Russians almost immediately began making ‘Euro-repairs’ to their homes, replacing communal toilets and baths with private ones. Bathrooms also uphold and actively enforce what Mary Douglas called society’s ‘cherished classifications’, particularly through their segregation of users. Even today, when few other sex-segregated facilities remain in our cities, we still expect to be presented with two doors, one marked ‘Ladies’ and the other ‘Gents’. Consider, however, that in the American South until the 1960s and in South Africa into the 1990s, users would have been presented with two doors marked ‘Whites’ and ‘Blacks’ (or, simply, ‘Non-whites’) in addition to the division by sex. That bathroom arrangements and divisions change according to the prevailing social structure underscores the reality that there is nothing ‘natural’ about them.

By preventing ‘promiscuous’ social mixing or activities, these segregated spaces not only reflect and shape relations between men and women, but also the ‘proper’ relations between people of the same sex. Segregated bathrooms are spaces of discipline in the sense that Michel Foucault defined the term: as well as keeping users apart, they are often designed to enable external surveillance and policing. But no matter how effective stalls and walls may be, just as powerful are the mechanisms of discipline that users have internalized (not least through ‘toilet training’) and which significantly influence everyday bathroom behaviour. Think, for instance, of the complicated etiquette of avoidance that governs men’s gazes at public urinals.

Far from resenting the disciplining design of bathrooms, many users see it as necessary, to protect them from physical attacks, bullying or contamination of various kinds. While it is important not to dismiss these concerns, this book will make clear that they do not always stem from real threats so much as from broader social anxieties. When people say they might ‘catch something’ in a public convenience, they often have in mind an illness or disease transmitted by a stigmatized social group (for example minority ethnicities, homosexuals, homeless people). In the 1980s and early ’90s toilet seats were wrongly believed to be breeding grounds for the HIV virus. Erroneous or not, these fears can have real consequences as they are often used to brutally enforce the status quo. As the sociologist David Inglis rightly reminds us, toilet habits are very often used to assert the cultural and biological inferiority of subaltern groups and classes: as an example, he observes that discrimination against British gypsy communities is frequently justified by the stereotype that they live in squalid conditions with filthy toilet facilities. As in the colonial period, the perception that certain groups are dirty or ‘excrementally uncontrolled’, in Inglis’s words, remains a powerful tool of denigration and exclusion today.

Unless we recognize the part bathrooms play in enforcing order and existing power relations, it is hard to make sense of why they are often such bitterly contested spaces. The recent ‘toilet wars’ in South Africa, when the provision of substandard toilets to township residents led to violent protests and politics clashes, provoked some astonished remarks from journalists. But should they have been surprised? Public facilities have often been at the front line of civil rights challenges; they are places where claims for equality are made and tested – and sometimes aggressively put down. It should not be forgotten that one of the first deaths of the American civil rights movement occurred when black activist Samuel Younge Jr tried to use a whites-only restroom at a filling station in Alabama: he was shot and killed by the attendant, who was subsequently cleared by an all-white jury. And restrooms would prove to be crucial sites for the Freedom Riders, who travelled across the southern states in 1961 to test whether interstate train stations, bus depots and airports had been desegregated in compliance with recent Supreme Court decisions.

bathroom history and evolution Gwendolyn Jenkins Jackson Municipal Airport

Freedom rider Gwendolyn Jenkins attempts to desegregate facilities at Jackson Municipal Airport, Mississippi, 7 June 1961

The very real threat of violence has not stopped a steady parade of marginalized or disadvantaged social groups from staking their claims for equal rights in the bathroom, from people with disabilities to the transgender community today. In fact, campaigns for improved access have been around for almost as long as public facilities themselves. Those for women’s conveniences have been the longest running and most far-reaching, having taken place in countries from the United Kingdom to Belgium to New Zealand. Protests have now reached Asia, too, as female activists in Guangzhou demonstrated in 2012 with their Occupy Men’s Toilets campaign. Some important victories have been scored in the last two decades, such as ‘potty parity’ laws in the United States, which mandate that for every one male toilet, two female toilets should be provided; similar laws have since been adopted in Singapore and Hong Kong. And New Zealand has declared that under human rights legislation, no woman should wait more than three minutes to go to the loo. For all these gains, however, the queue for the Ladies is in no immediate danger of extinction.

bathroom history and evolution Modern Times

Charlie Chaplin, Modern Times, 1936

Of course, many acts of social and political resistance are performed not collectively, but individually. Even the most utilitarian bathroom can serve as a place for small transgressions, where one can temporarily escape the routines and pressures of life. This is beautifully captured in Modern Times (1936, dir. Charlie Chaplin) when the Tramp, struggling to keep up with a factory assembly line, retreats to the washroom. Assuming he is unobserved, he perches on the edge of the sink and gratefully lights a cigarette, only to have the company president appear on a giant two-way screen behind him and order him back to work. The President’s invasion of the washroom, the one place where the Tramp might reasonably expect some peace (he even clocked out at the door), exposes the company’s ruthless drive to control its workers’ bodies and time. Interestingly, the essence of this scene rings true in the sense that washrooms in American factories and in institutions were frequently not fully enclosed or had stalls without doors, presumably to discourage shirking or illicit activities. As Chaplin no doubt well knew, in the same way that privacy in the bathroom reflects class privilege and status, its absence reflects disenfranchisement and subjection.

When they occur, the temporary moments of release or liberation offered in bathrooms are often intensely personal, but they can also destabilize larger social norms and taboos. The inspiring Iranian documentary Zananeh (The Ladies Room, 2003, dir. Mahnaz Afzali) focuses on the social life fostered by a women’s restroom in a public park in Tehran. The bathroom in Laleh Park offers its users, mostly homeless women or prostitutes, a space for sociability and for uncensored conversation. In the shelter of the public toilet they can smoke, discuss forbidden topics and even remove their veils in violation of Iranian conventions. As well as fostering camaraderie among people of the same sex, public facilities can equally shelter forbidden sexual acts and are central to the queer practices of cruising and cottaging.

Bathrooms are clearly impossible to decisively categorize. They are among the most regulated spaces in contemporary society and the most potentially liberating. They are emblems of civility and containers of social threat. In them we confront our basest bodily needs, even as we transcend them or flush them away. They are places of passage and of transformation: one enters the bathroom dirty and leaves it clean. Hence even when functionalist attitudes were strongest, in the first half of the twentieth century, bathing retained the sense of a purification ritual. Indeed, one of the most iconic works in the history of modern art, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), teasingly asserted the quasi-spiritual aura of the urinal. But, by turning it upside down and leaving it unplumbed, Duchamp made it unusable, perversely denying us the release that encounters with urinals – and with art – are meant to provide.

bathroom history and evolution Marcel Duchamp Fountain

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917, replica of 1964, porcelain

One legacy of Duchamp’s work is that generations of artists have been inspired to use sanitary fittings in their works or have sited their work in bathrooms. Some have reworked Fountain itself, such as Sherrie Levine’s version cast in bronze of 1991. Many, however, have simply drawn from Duchamp the lesson that bathroom fittings are ambiguous in meaning. They unsettle. They provoke. In short, they are anything but ‘plain pieces of plumbing’, as Duchamp’s supporters ingenuously maintained. Artists today use the bathroom to probe personal and collective repressions and the way these affect identity, especially female or queer identity. In their works, the bathroom emerges as a classic ‘backstage’ space: a place that hides the messy realities of the female body (such as in Judy Chicago’s Menstruation Bathroom, 1972), contains sexual desire (Terence Koh’s sculpture Medusa, 2006, for example) or permits moments of revelation and remaking (tropes beautifully enacted in some of Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills, 1977–80).

bathroom history and evolution bi-bardon

Alex Schweder, Bi-Bardon, 2001, mixed media installation

The acknowledgement of these artworks is important because they speak powerfully of the body, experience, and bathroom use and abuse – subjects that are often suppressed in polite discourse and which emerge instead in euphemisms or jokes. We cannot ignore the fact that, rather than being too inconsequential for words, bathrooms remain embarrassing, even unspeakable subjects for many, even for those in the design professions. Artwork that re- imagines the bathroom and its fittings, like Alex Schweder’s ‘Siamese’ urinal Bi-Bardon (2001), addresses these strategic silences, often with wit and humanity. They open up questions: why are bathrooms designed as they are? Could they be designed differently, and if they were, how might our society be transformed?

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