Academia goes down the toilet

When I first saw the ''Call for Papers -- Toilet Papers: The Gendered Construction of Public Toilets" posted on an academic website, my beeswax detector went off. There can't really be two professors planning to publish a book working from ''the premise that public toilets, far from being banal or simply functional, are highly charged spaces, shaped by notions of propriety, hygiene and the binary gender division" . . . can there?

Olga Gershenson, assistant professor of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, didn't respond to my initial e-mail, so I asked UMass spokesman Patrick Callahan if this might be a hoax. ''Possibly," opined Callahan, who sees a lot more academic life than I do. ''But something tells me it's not."

Good call, Patrick! When I did reach Gershenson, she confirmed that her book endeavor, co-edited by Barbara Penner of University College-London, was a ''very serious project in an established field of inquiry combining feminist architecture and feminist design." Penner is the author of two journal articles on related subjects, both published in 2001: ''A world of unmentionable suffering: Women's public conveniences in Victorian London" and ''Female urinals: Taking a stand."

Here is some more rhetoric from the book proposal: ''Indeed, public toilets are among the very few openly segregated spaces in contemporary Western culture, and the physical differences between 'gentlemen' and 'ladies' remains central to (and is further naturalized by) their design. As such, they provide a fertile ground for critical work interrogating how conventional assumptions about the body, sexuality, privacy, and technology can be formed in public space and inscribed through design."

Gershenson filled me in on some of the recent endeavors in toilet studies, for instance the special 2002 issue of the journal Postcolonial Studies dedicated to bathrooms and postcolonialism. Sample article: ''Flushing in the future: the supermodern Japanese toilet in a changing domestic culture." She also provided a list of scholars who plan to contribute to her forthcoming book, and I did manage to speak with Dr. Clara Greed, a member of the Faculty of the Built Environment at the University of the West of England.

Greed, the author of ''Public Toilets: Inclusive Urban Design," is something of a celebrity in Great Britain. Just back from the WTO meeting in Shanghai -- ''the other WTO," she explained, ''the World Toilet Organization, not the World Trade Organization" -- she was happy to talk about her paper for the Gershenson-Penner tome. ''They asked me to look at toilets in terms of transmission of disease and as a means for creating a healthier society," Greed said. ''It's true that most of my research has been in the UK, so my paper has to be a bit more international."

Greed knows that toilet research attracts sniggering commentaries, but she defends the work's importance. ''It's an Anglo-Saxon thing, or perhaps an Anglo-American thing, that this research seems like a joke. But it's a very serious issue because everybody needs to go to the toilet.

''It's a global issue nowadays. A nation is judged by its toilets."

Yes, they hate us
The category is erudite foreign visitors who drop a stink bomb on Boston before proceeding to the throbbing nexus of American culture, New York. The latest entrant: British novelist John Fowles, who toe-touched Beantown in 1963 to visit his publisher Little, Brown (now, like everything, domiciled in New York) before heading south for the real action. From the just-published ''Journals":

''Monday morning, into Boston in the rain. It seems a terribly ugly city, coarse and dirty, even though the area around Beacon Hill has a certain charm. 'This is really nice,' says Ned [Bradford, his Little, Brown editor]. But it isn't. And the tired jams of long-tailed cars. The way American men drive their huge cars. Even miserable old wizened sheep try to look toughly relaxed, virile to the grave, in the driving-seat. They have a pathetic lack of dignity."

Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com.