retheorizing the toilet

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Thu Sep 21 10:19:02 PDT 2000


Chris Kromm wrote:


>I trust this is a joke? The sad part is, it's so hard to tell these days...

What's so preposterous about a study of the toilet? Dominique Laporte wrote a fascinating History of Shit, just published by MIT Press; he argued that the protocols that emerged in the 18th century for handling waste were crucial to the development of bourgeois individualism. Slavoj Zizek has a wonderful little riff about national toilet styles (and national pubic hair styles) and their relations to "national character."

It's always interesting to note what people don't want to talk about.

Doug



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