ABSTRACT
Reflecting on both the classic work of Norbert Elias and casual observations of daily life, Spencer E. Cahill comments on conduct surrounding the fluid literal and metaphorical boundaries of the public and private body. Cahill’s analysis illuminates the dramaturgical body – a body fashioned, crafted, negotiated, manipulated and largely in ritualized social and cultural conventions (see Chapter One, this volume). In this case, as Cahill illustrates, it is a body subject to the zoning ordinances of society in which, by means of cultural practice, the public body is made “public” and the private body is kept “private.” Cahill’s reflections on public bathrooms, moments of bodily malfunction, as well as gyms and fitness centres, implicate these boundaries and practices and much more: “Whether we rigidly adhere to conventional bodily boundaries, habitually relax them, or poke meaningful holes in them, we acknowledge them” and therefore they are of much greater significance then they first appear.
