For me, the most interesting pieces of the readings on shit that we covered this past week revolved around the role that shit played in colonial practices and racial discrimination. One of the examples that stuck with me was from the paper, Excrementalisms: revaluing what we have only ever known as waste, by Daniel Gerling. Throughout this paper, the term “sanitary imperialism” is used repeatedly to describe the actions of U.S. health inspectors in occupied territories such as Cuba and the Philippines. Previously, I had never considered how modern sanitary practices had been developed and homogenized across the globe. As it turns out, force was often the common factor. Sanitary practices were weaponized, and when the practices of other countries or territories didn’t fit the narrow, American, definition of what was ‘clean’, they were forced to comply often through violence.
Racial discrimination was another key point in this sanitary crusade. While already being linked by racists of the time to uncleanliness due to their skin color not being white, many minority populations were further labeled as “filthy” or even “defecators” for their traditional sanitary practices. For me today, plumbing and other sanitary practices are simply a fact of life, something that exists in the background. Never until this reading, had I considered how these systems came to be commonplace, or how integrated they were with systems of colonialism and racial discrimination. This makes me wonder what other systems or items that are considered commonplace today have oppressive roots or histories.