Making visible off-grid toilet waste management: embodied sanitation infrastructure in Nepal

In this paper we aim to make visible how people manage their off-grid toilets in Gulariya, Nepal. The infrastructural labour that is involved in the everyday management of sewerage free toilets is often invisible and can be left relatively unconsidered in large off-grid toilet building programmes. However, greater attention needs to be given to discriminatory embodied sanitation infrastructures globally − these infrastructures may enable a town or city to function, but they place certain marginalized bodies at risk of illness and even death. Through participatory photography we remedy some of the invisibility of sanitation infrastructure and show how citizens are managing toilet waste (faecal sludge) themselves (unpaid) or as paid pit emptying sanitation workers. Participant photos in this paper makes visible the harsh realities of faecal waste management routines and the wider challenges and precarities participants face in this remote region, where climate related temperature extremes, flash flooding and earthquakes were found to further exacerbate the challenges of living with sewerage free sanitation. We propose that a concept of ‘embodied sanitation infrastructure’ helps to highlight how conjunctions of people, practices, technology and bodily labours simultaneously ‘enable’ by allowing toilets to function but also ‘disable’ by keeping the marginalized poor in their existing social positions. In this way the paper provides a conceptually and empirically innovative account of off-grid toilet management, drawing the infrastructure of toilet waste management out of invisibility.