Designed to divide: public toilets in Cape Town, 1880-1940

In: http://hdl.handle.net/11427/29499

Open Access

Abstract

This dissertation seeks to explore the frequently overlooked site of public toilets in relation to the politics of production and maintenance of social hierarchies in Cape Town between 1880 and 1940. In particular, it examines how public toilets both reflected and operationalised new understandings of demarcation of space, and disciplining and distribution of bodily functions. Rather than providing a comprehensive history of this municipally provided facility, this dissertation aims at exploring the ways in which the scanty, scattered and seemingly technical archive on public toilets can be used to understand the co-production of the built environment and social values.The emphasis on the spatial and the corporeal aspects of this history not only allows us to challenge the abstraction of the 'public' with which historians usually operate, but also to recognize how, for the city officials, the human body's capacity to generate waste was both a source of anxiety and a means of constructing "inferiority" among particular groups of people. The dissertation consists of a chapter-length introduction, followed by three chapters based on primary research. In conversation with a range of conceptual and comparative academic literature, the introductory chapter identifies and examines the key theoretical questions underlying a possible history of public toilets in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Cape Town. Chapter One interrogates the public-ness of the so-called public toilets, by Abstract critically engaging the intersections of race, class and gender, and by calling attention to their role in the maintenance of social hierarchies. Chapter Two focuses primarily on the question of infrastructure and design, trying to place the relationship between material designs and physical bodies at the centre of a history of practices. Chapter Three is concerned with the use and control of public toilets, and traces the ways in which both toilet users and attendants negotiated the values and habits that city officials tried to enforce in and through this institution. This research has drawn on a variety of archival sources, including Mayor's Minutes, Reports of the Medical Officers of Health, correspondence between the city council and members of the public, Select Committee Reports, articles in and letters to the press, maps of the city, architect's plans, as well as contemporary fictional literature.