Powder Room 101.(The Talk of the Town)(Harvey Molotch's 'The Urban Toilet' course)

Professor Harvey Molotch arrived for class last Wednesday fresh from a meeting with architects and N.Y.U. administrators about the design for a new home for the school's Department of Social and Cultural Analysis. He was pleased to report that the committee had agreed to build a unisex bathroom. "How radical are we going to be?" he asked, rhetorically. "They've ruled 'No urinals,' but we're not accepting that. It isn't a simple building decision. It's an intellectual decision." Urinals, as one of the students pointed out, save water, among other things. Molotch then passed around a piece of writing by Clara Greed, of the World Toilet Organization (the other W.T.O.), and read aloud a passage about "the restroom revolution which is going on in the Far East."

"Does she use the phrase 'Far East'?" a young woman asked, sounding incredulous. "It's really Western-centric, obviously."

"O.K., so Clara stepped into that one, but she's otherwise good on toilets," Molotch said. He had with him a book of Greed's, "Inclusive Urban Design," that had been covered with a brown paper bag--the better to protect it against unsanitary environments, perhaps. "The book is unabashed," he said. "A better rest room is a better life."

Molotch's course is called "The Urban Toilet," and its remarkable syllabus reads almost like a parody of Allan Bloom's worst nightmare, bringing the jargon of gender and ethnic studies, city planning, and industrial design to bear on the most euphemized of subjects. Consider a few of the texts:

Week 3: Intimate Pollution (Contemporary), Jo-Anne Bichard, Julienne Hanson and Clara Greed. "Please Wash Your Hands." In The Senses and Society Vol. 2 Issue 3 p. 385-390.

Week 7: Race, Class & Gender, Penner, Barbara. (2001b) "A World of Unmentionable Suffering: Women's Public Conveniences in Victorian London." In Journal of Design History Vol. 14, (35-52)., Mitchell Duneier "When You Gotta Go" from Sidewalk. NY: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1999.

Week 8: Sexual Spaces, Lee Edelman, "Men's Room" in Joel Sanders (ed). (1996) Stud: Architectures of Masculinity. Princeton Papers on Architecture Series. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.