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- ## LEAKING citizens
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- This theme explores the politics of dwelling in public.
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- How and in what ways have bodies been problematized as leaky –with blood, fat, urine, milk? What impact does the ability to contain and/or release fluids outside the home have on people’s freedom of movement? Rights? Access to the public sphere? Ability to participate in urban life? How have clothing inventors sought to address these issues for mobile citizens? Urinating, for example, is a fundamental human need and the ability to urinate safely with privacy and dignity is a universal human right. <sup>1</sup> However, being able to urinate outside of the home is not equally experienced. Toilet provisions, and lack thereof, enable, constrain and organize different people. As such, social and cultural norms combined with infrastructural privileges, exclude and discriminate some people and shape how they inhabit, dwell and move through public life and public space.
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- This chapter discusses the multiple ways clothing inventors have resisted normative restrictions on different kinds of bodies in public space. It turns out inventors have ranted about problems related to urinating and leaking (breastfeeding, menstruating) for well over a century –and invented many opportunities for people to contain, spill out of conventional restrictions and/or relieve themselves and dwell in public space for longer, with more control and dignity. These inventions offer alternate practices to ‘unleash’ wearers from the home and society’s judgmental eye and otherwise enabled women and other marginalized people to more fully participate in many parts of life.
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- Examples of patents to be explored in this theme: Pissing (inventions to assist women urinate in public space), Menstruating (catamenial sacks and aprons), Breastfeeding (adaptable clothing for easier access).
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- 1 2015 resolution at the United Nations GeneralAssembly –sanitation is a human right
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