On Toilets as Media Furniture and Incontinent Containers

At the intersection between toilets and media, plumbing transforms into a seat and setting where media practices unfold. Toilets, I argue, function as media furniture, both holding bodies and threatening them as "incontinent" containers when media devices fall into the bowl. Situating toilet-media culture in historical context, I investigate how bathrooms—as fraught spaces caught between privateness and publicness and entangled in questions of gender, sex, safety, and health—uneasily afford media consumption. Such a case adds further dimensions to how media scholarship can understand matters of embodiment, materiality, mobility, ability, and everyday life.