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“It takes a brave scholar to write about the history of shit.” - Nancy Tomes
To live is to shit. Excretion, the expulsion from the body of excess material, is a function shared by all organisms. Yet, despite the plainly universal fact of defecation in human lives, the everyday act of shitting seems to have mostly eluded the gaze of sociocultural researchers throughout the 20th century. Is our sense of collective discomfort at the act truly so great that we would overlook this most vital of human activities and the wealth of cultural knowledge and understandings relating to it?
Now, as the world barrels headlong toward ecological catastrophe, the issue of how we manage our collective waste has grown more pertinent than ever. Shit is no exception. The last few years have provided myriad examples of the inherently political nature of shit: from conflicts over transgender bathroom access in the United States to reports that Amazon workers’ bathroom breaks are tightly controlled or the Israeli Defence Forces’ specific targeting of sewage and water treatment facilities in Gaza.
By comparing such apparently disparate phenomena we can begin to piece together a broader understanding of the ways in which control over access to the technologies of shitting is employed by states and powerful institutions as a form of control over populations themselves. Through the toilet bodies can be disciplined into gendered norms, workers can be squeezed for higher profits and ‘undesirable’ populations can be wiped out entirely. Like the sewers themselves, the politics of shit flow hidden beneath the surface, a dirty little open secret that silently shapes the world above.
Despite the apparent stink which surrounds the topic the last two decades have seen a marked increase in scholarly interest in shit. Braver scholars are wading in and beginning to elaborate a critical understanding of this highly overlooked topic. The purpose of this website is to advocate for the long-overdue “shitty turn” in socio-cultural research. Drawing on emerging research from across the social sciences as well as original research conducted for this project, this website will seek to academically explore the topic of shit and shitting. Within you will find original articles on the topic, scholarly reviews, reports from my own interviews and an archive of academic reading material for scholars interested in taking the plunge into the fascinating world of shit.