Public toilets provide an opportunity for interrogating how conventional assumptions about the body, sexuality, privacy, and technology are formed in public spaces and inscribed through design across cultures. This collection also explores the cultural meanings, histories, and ideologies of public toilets as gendered spaces.

Foreword Acknowledgments Introduction: The Private Life of Public ConveniencesPotty Politics: Toilets, Gender, and Identity 1. The Role of the Public Toilet in Civic Life 2. Potty Privileging in Perspective: Gender and Family Issues in Toilet Design 3. Geographies of Danger: School Toilets in Sub-Saharan Africa 4. Gender, Respectability, and Public Convenience in Melbourne, Australia, 1859–1902 5. Bodily Privacy, Toilets, and Sex Discrimination: The Problem of “Manhood” in a Women’s Prison 6. Colonial Visions of “Third World” Toilets: A Nineteenth-Century Discourse That Haunts Contemporary Tourism 7. Avoidance: On Some Euphemisms for the “Smallest Room”Toilet Art: Design and Cultural Representations 8. Were Our Customs Really Beautiful? Designing Refugee Camp Toilets 9. (Re)Designing the “Unmentionable”: Female Toilets in the Twentieth Century 10. Marcel Duchamp’s Legacy: Aesthetics, Gender, and National Identity in the Toilet 11. Toilet Training: Sarah Lucas’s Toilets and the Transmogrification of the Body 12. Stalls between Walls: Segregated Sexed Spaces 13. “Our Little Secrets”: A Pakistani Artist Explores the Shame and Pride of Her Community’s Bathroom Practices 14. In the Men’s Room: Death and Derision in Cinematic Toilets 15. “White Tiles. Trickling Water. A Man!” Literary Representations of Cottaging in London 16. The Jew on the Loo: The Toilet in Jewish Popular Culture, Memory, and Imagination Afterword Contributors Index

"Thoughtful analysis of the place of toilets in modern culture and psyche has often been as hard to find as a decent public convenience in any major Western city. Ladies and Gents is a timely and educational addition to the unheralded and hitherto sorely neglected field of toilet studies."—Rose George, author of The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters