Hawai’ian toilet paper

“Toilets are no mere receptacles for waste, but a domestic feature that connects us to the world: that which exits our bodies goes somewhere, whether we choose to think about it or not.”

– explains Dr. Lucy Pickering, a Sociology Anthropology and Applied Social Sciences Adviser of Studies, and Lecturer, at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, in her paper ‘Toilets, Bodies, Selves: Enacting Composting as Counterculture in Hawai’i ‘ (Body & Society Vol. 16 No. 4, December 2010).
The author looks at the everyday defecatory practices of hippies and drop-outs in Hawai’i, who :

“… rejected multiple bathrooms, indeed indoor bathrooms altogether. They did not believe that ‘American toilets are the best’ but abandoned them in favour of hand-made receptacles of varying design.”

Citing previous toilet-focussed works from Slavoj Žižek,  Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, and of course Sigmund Freud, the author concludes that perhaps there could be a political  dimension to the composters’ bathroom-rejection?

“Through toilets, the people with whom I worked generated multiple connections with their immediate environment – and through that with each other – and enacted a daily critique both of male gender as bounded and of US toilets (and therefore the USA?) as ‘top of the evolutionary or civilizational scale’.”

Posted by Martin Gardiner on
Friday, June 24th, 2011 at 12:02 am
under News about research.