Wednesday, January 21, 2026, 4 – 5:30pm EST

Infrastructures of Discomfort and Bullshit Access: Public Toileting in NYC in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
This lecture is part of the Taft Colloquium Interlocutor Lecture Series.
Disability rights and justice movements have spurred the development of accessibility across public and private spaces in the United States. This has included infrastructural reforms to everyday institutional and shared spaces, including curb cuts and ramps, as well as the availability of accessible toilets, with wide stalls and hand bars. But how do we reckon with accessible toilets that are actually inaccessible because they are dangerous, costly, or policed? In this talk, I develop “bullshit access” to account for how accessibility has become a means of publicity with little consequence when it is ultimately unavailable. I focus on the history of publicly accessible toilets in Manhattan to develop these ideas, showing how inaccessible public toileting shapes public life in New York City, ensuring that only some people can participate in the public sphere. I suggest that the lack of public toilets is an “infrastructure of discomfort” that some people have found ways to unsettle through social and technological practices that upset expectations of bodily comportment in the American public sphere.
This lecture is co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology.

About Matthew Wolf-Meyer
Matthew Wolf-Meyer is an anthropologist and historian of science and medicine in the U.S. Wolf-Meyer marries ethnographic research with patients, their families, and patient support networks, participant-observation of scientists, clinicians, and health care workers, and archival analysis of scientific monographs and public policies to show how thorny, contemporary problems have developed out of longstanding ideas about health and disease, disability and normalcy, and nature and civilization.