Potty politics: The biopolitical and bioeconomic implications of sanitation infrastructure mega-projects in Cairo, Mumbai, and Shanghai

In the last decade, Egypt, India, and China have all declared national sanitation for all campaigns, building large-scale sanitation systems and millions of toilets as a solution to the persistent crisis of controlling surplus human waste. Scholars and journalists have heralded these initiatives as major modernization projects. At its core, the conception of sanitation as a marker of modernization has been centered around the need to contain the stench and surplus of human waste, and in public health fears about excreta related infectious diseases that would render bodies unproductive. Across Trip Advisor ratings to policy making discourses, stench and fear are always at the center of concern around who and what is excessive or out of place, and how they are to be controlled. “Potty Politics,” is an interdisciplinary transnational examination of sanitation projects as sites of biopolitical and bioeconomic state regulation in three global mega-cities: Cairo, Mumbai, and Shanghai. All three cities are sites of vast inequality, with 40-60% of the population living in informal settlements which are sites of poor sanitation, as well as intense surveillance, in increasingly authoritarian nationalist states. “Potty Politics” centers the experiences of stigmatized and overlooked populations in both the colonial and contemporary moment who work on the street, such as fruit vendors in Cairo, third-gender hijras in Mumbai, and militarized sex-workers in British colonial cantonments, as they navigate sanitary landscapes that criminalize poverty and inflict bodily violence. I illustrate how the threat or symbolic inclusion of these neglected populations is used by the state to pursue social and urban cleansing, clearing the way for capitalist urban development and nationalist fervor. Control over who or what is excessive has led to justifications for invasive new measures embedded in sanitation projects, such as toilets that automate fecal analysis in the bowl, YouTube channels exposing public urinators, #NoLooNoIDo social media campaigns, and facial recognition cameras in public toilets. Taken together, these examples of state and community regulation and enforcement mechanisms reveal that sanitation for all projects are not ultimately about providing public works provisions for the public good. I use interdisciplinary methods including interviews, discourse analysis, participant observation, and toilet mapping to demonstrate how logics of modernization, morality, and risk are used to extend state control over bodies and public spaces through these sanitation and hygiene campaigns. Through extensive multi-sited fieldwork conducted in four countries, I explore how these projects impact community socialities, while also capturing human feces as a source of capital and biodata. I contend that the collection of human waste facilitates state participation in emerging speculative and existing material bioeconomies of excrement, and incorporates wastewater surveillance within an expanding security architecture. In addition to exploring sanitary projects in the contemporary moment, “Potty Politics” also offers an alternative history of the biopolitics of sanitation in the colonial period in Cairo, Mumbai, and Shanghai.