Making Sense of Society: Lauren White
For the last two years the United Kingdom’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) has held a writing competition to encourage and recognize the writing skills of ESRC-funded students. Winners for the 2016 round were honored March 21 at a ceremony in London. Social Science Space will publish the winning essays, runners-up and eight shortlisted pieces in the next few weeks; here we present “Living and Looking for Lavatories,” a winning essay from Lauren White of the University of Sheffield. For more on the competition, click here.
(Photo: © Jorge Royan / http://www.royan.com.ar / CC BY-SA 3.0)
Living and Looking for Lavatories
By Lauren White
Lauren White
It may be a turn of the stomach, a nervous flutter, a morning coffee or a sudden, unpredictable rush. You may look for a sign, if you are lucky enough to live in a society where they are readily available. There may or may not be a queue, often depending on the room of your gender. You may look for disabled access, whether you are in a wheelchair or whether you have an invisible illness. You may select a space based on who is there or your perception of the cleanliness. For some, it is an unwritten rule that one cannot go next to another person relieving themselves. What are you looking for?
A lavatory.
Also, known as a toilet, bog, ladies, gents, piss pot, restroom, dunny, convenience, powder room, and the WC, to name a few.
Toilets are mundane, an everyday space, a common fixture in the home and the workplace, a thing that we all use, in a diversity of ways. Toilets have historically been (and continue to be) shaped by our cultures, gender, social class and ethnicity with clear boundaries, distinctions and divisions imposed. This, in turn, shapes our social identities.Toilets are a personal thing; a private side of life that is rarely discussed, or if we do disclose our habits or toilet trips we do so with hesitation, euphemisms or a nervous giggle. However, toilets are a very public issue. They are in department stores, coffee shops, pubs, restaurants and on trains. There is a declining number of public toilets, now often vandalised and abandoned, perceived as unhygienic, or a place of illegal activity and other ‘hazards’.
Toilets are a source of interaction, of social structures, organisation, norms and values. So why aren’t sociologists discussing them more?
I have a bowel problem. I live with an unpredictable bowel, one that changes every day; from abdominal pain, to bloating and urgency to find a toilet. Bowel conditions are not socially accepted and discussed conditions, a disclosure often thought as ‘too much information’. The anxiety of the symptoms and the need to use toilets led me to toilet mapping; making mental notes of the nearest toilets, and the quickest way to get to them. Toilets became not just a functional space, but also a place of safety, and, relief in more than one sense.
I am not alone. There are a variety of conditions for which knowledge of toilet locations are crucial for managing symptoms – conditions such as bladder incontinence, Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) and Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), for example. My PhD research is focusing on the common condition of IBS. According to NHS Choices, 20% of the UK population lives with IBS, with arguably more given the concealment of the condition. Despite this, bowel conditions and the symptoms of constipation, diarrhoea, flatulence, (in)continence, and other activities that take place in the ‘private’ realm of the toilets, remain heavily taboo topics in contemporary western society.
My research explores the lived experience of managing symptoms of IBS, particularly in the spaces where symptoms are mostly managed; the bathroom.
My research examines how places such as toilets, can be reflective of our practices of privacy and containment of our bodily excretions. We may divide ourselves and our relations to each other in such a way that makes life with conditions such as IBS incredibly isolating. This means that the coping strategies and challenges faced in the day to day life of people who live with these conditions are underappreciated, hidden, and crucially, misunderstood.
Some would argue that bathrooms and toilets are the backstage of social life. However, there are many performances still going on within the toilet cubicle: the holding on until another person has left the toilet, waiting until the hand dryer goes on or blaming the time spent in the toilet on a fictional queue. Whilst this may seem an obvious behaviour of privacy and dignity, the strategies of toilet mapping and negotiating toilet spaces to keep the IBS identity private, questions the boundaries of society; the public and the private, the clean and the dirty, self and other.
In discussing my research, I often face a reception of pure horror, a nervous laugh or a joke, but very rarely an open, honest discussion of our own bowel habits and toilet behaviours. The awkwardness around the topic creates greater challenges for those living with bowel conditions, and reinforces stigma. Some may laugh at the fact I talk about poo and toilets in my academic life. There may be banter in the bowels, a joke that I need a colon in my future research papers or conference presentations. But is the difficulty of living with an unpredictable bowel in an unaccommodating society really that funny? It’s time to talk shit.
Other essays from the competition:
Winners
“Once more, with feeling: life as bilingual” |Wilhelmiina Toivo, University of Glasgow
“Living and looking for lavatories” | Lauren White, University of Sheffield
Runners-up
“Marginal money, mainstream economy”| Max Gallien, London School of Economics and Political Science
“Biotechnology and the world of tomorrow” | Elo Luik, University of Oxford
Shortlisted
“Better healthcare with deep data” | Alison Harper, University of Exeter
“Child labour: making childhood work” |Sophie Hedges, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
“What future while living in uncertainty?” | Vanessa Hughes, Goldsmiths, University of London
“Ensuring a sweeter future” | Siobhan Maderson, Aberystwyth University
“Understanding the forgotten decade” | David Pollard, University of Birmingham
“Schools, funding and donor power” | Ruth Puttick, Newcastle University
“Fostering inclusion in the face of division” | Caoimhe Ryan, University of St Andrews
“Listen to the local” | Ruben Schneider, University of Aberdeen
