ABSTRACT
Historically, people with disabilities had been either segregated within or isolated from the social world for so long that their public presence typically solicited pity rather than registering recognition. For many disability rights activists in the 1960s and 1970s, the built environment served as an immediate conduit to social tolerance and inclusive citizenship. The lack of available toilet facilities during the occupation of federal offices in San Francisco did not prevent disabled activists from sustaining their protest but in fact may have shifted its terms, since their inability to use the toilet was both symbolic of and material evidence for their exclusion from the public sphere. By lifting the veil on their most intimate bodily functions, protesters demanded recognition that the piss and shit of the disabled were produced not by androgynous bodies or amorphously asexual bodies but by bodies shaped by the same kinds of material and experiential needs as the able-bodied.
