Neoliberal Toilets: A Social History of the Public Bathroom

at LAUREN BERLANT 3CT GRADUATE STUDENT CONFERENCE, Attachment Issues: Psychopolitics and the Everyday

Friday, April 15, and Saturday, April 16, 2022

 In March of 2020, in response to the rapidly spreading novel coronavirus, places of public accommodation closed or severely limited their offerings. One of the most drastic and universal closures was of bathrooms, even in businesses, restaurants, and stores that otherwise remained open in some limited capacity. While the experience of finding a bathroom to meet the most basic of human needs has always been precarious for some, the pandemic response and concern over the bathroom as a site of transmission and disease exposed this inconvenience to a much broader range of city-goers. Individuals who previously experienced race, gender, and class privileges that allowed them to persuade a bookstore owner or barista to allow them to use their facility now confronted much the same humiliating and uncomfortable reality that homeless, disabled, and trans people, amongst many others have long known to be the experience of needing a toilet while in public. This crisis of public bathrooms is just one of many ways that the covid-19 pandemic exposed and compounded existing systemic failures. 

The history of public toilets can be a lens through which we may understand shifting social norms. Whether subtly implied or publicly and contentiously debated, these physical spaces enforce ideas about which bodies are legible, political, and worth encoding. Contemporarily, the bleak landscape of publicly provided and maintained bathrooms in American cities is a useful metric for the erosion of the welfare state. This exemplifies the neoliberal reliance on the “free market” to provide services otherwise understood as part of the social contract.