Public panics: Problematic bodies in social space

This paper emerged from a three year study investigating the experience and management of Britain's night-time economy. In focus groups and interviews respondents spoke of their concern about uncivil behaviours on the streets after dark. Using public urination as one example of late-night incivility, I explore what it means to research a topic that circulates such themes as disgust, intimacy, and civility. However, in this paper I am not so much interested in the rights and wrongs of urinating in public, as in the discursive tensions that frame this topic, tensions which act to separate us along axes of moral/immoral, clean/dirty, male/female. In reference to the work of photographer Ellen Jong, who has photographed herself publicly urinating across various landscapes, the discussion turns to the notion of interest and disgust as ways of figuring the connections and disconnections that urinating in public elicits.