Seemingly banal and certainly backstage, washrooms are epitomic sites of wasting/cleaning. Allied with sociolinguistic interest in blue-collar work/places, this paper envisions luxury washrooms in high-end shopping malls as an ideal space for tracing the organisation of waste work and workers. Drawing on a larger discourse-ethnographic study, and grounded in geosemiotic principles, my analysis identifies three spatial-semiotic strategies by which habitual relations with bodily waste are organised: (1) documentary regimes and/as surveillant landscapes; (2) technologies of un/knowing and in/visibility; and (3) micro-landscapes of cleaning labour and makeshift life. Each of these strategies is documented and illustrated by means of photographic evidence. In the spirit of complicating centre-periphery power dynamics, I centre elite washrooms as sites of neoliberal work inequality, ultimately surfacing the marginalised experiences of blue-collar work communities as they are lived, interpreted, and contested anew.
C. Kong (Wed,) studied this question.