Ethnographic Film Series

GENDER & CITY

Organised by the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Film Committee and the SOAS Department of Anthropology & Sociology

Wednesday 21 January 1-3pm, Khalili Lecture Theatre, SOAS Main Building

Q2P

Paromita Vohra, 2006, 55 mins

Q2P is a film about toilets and the city. It sifts through the dream of Mumbai as a future Shanghai and searches for public toilets, watching who has to queue to pee. As the film observes who has access to toilets and who doesn’t, we begin to also see the imagination of gender that underlies the city’s shape, the constantly shifting boundaries between public and private space; we learn of small acts of survival that people in the city’s bottom half cobble together and quixotic ideas of social change that thrive with mixed results; we hear the silence that surrounds toilets and sense how similar it is to the silence that surrounds inequality. The toilet becomes a riddle with many answers and some of those answers are questions – about gender, about class, about caste and most of all about space, urban development and the twisted myth of the global metropolis.

For further information on the films please contact: RAI Film Officer, Susanne Hammacher, film@therai.org.uk, or Mahnaz Marashi, SOAS Anthropology Department, mm97@soas.ac.uk