Savez-vous ce que Dexter signifie en latin ? Pourriez-vous expliquer la querelle historique entre Adidas et Puma ? Connaissez-vous l'histoire de l'éléphant blanc de Charlemagne ? Avez-vous entendu parler des porcs-épics de Schopenhauer ? Si vous êtes incapable de répondre, vous avez sérieusement besoin de vous cultiver ! Mais vous n'avez pas 2 minutes à perdre, et surtout pas 2 minutes 33 ! Aux toilettes, sous la douche, pendant votre pause café, utilisez vos temps morts pour travailler votre culture générale, grâce à 70 leçons de 2 minutes 33 ! Transformez votre temps perdu en vous cultivant sur un large panel de thématiques : histoire, géographie, littérature, politique, et même navigation, pourquoi pas... Et bien d'autres encore !

Public toilets provide a unique opportunity for interrogating how conventional assumptions about the body, sexuality, privacy, and technology are formed in public spaces and inscribed through design across cultures. This collection of original essays from international scholars is the first to explore the cultural meanings, histories, and ideologies of public toilets as gendered spaces. Ladies and Gents consists of two sets of essays. The first, "Potty Politics: Toilets, Gender and Identity," establishes the importance of accessible, secure public toilets to the creation of inclusive cities, work, and learning environments. The second set of essays, "Toilet Art: Design and Cultural Representations," discusses public toilets as spaces of representation and representational spaces, with reference to architectural design, humor, film, theater, art, and popular culture. Compelling visual materials and original artwork are included throughout, depicting subjects as varied as female urinals, art installations sited in public restrooms, and the toilet in contemporary art. Taken together, these seventeen essays demonstrate that public toilets are often sites where gendered bodies compete for resources and recognition—and the stakes are high. Contributors include: Nathan Abrams, Jami L. Anderson, Johan Andersson, Kathryn H. Anthony, Kathy Battista, Andrew Brown-May, Ben Campkin, Meghan Dufresne, Peg Fraser, Deborah Gans, Clara Greed, Robin Lydenberg, Claudia Mitchell, Alison Moore, Frances Pheasant-Kelly, Bushra Rehman, Alex Schweder, Naomi Stead, and the editors.

Published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Apr. 26-Aug. 7, 2011, and at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Sept. 18-Dec. 10, 2011.

Examines nineteenth-century hairstyles and their cultural associations, and analyzes the social and symbolic roles that hair played in literary representations of the new body ideal of the era in fashion magazines, and as clues to social status, sexual availability and character in the fiction of major French authors including Baudelaire, Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola.

The papers collected in this volume discuss applied, pedagogical and ideological issues related to language use in selected countries in post-colonial Anglophone Africa. The collection represents new voices in linguistics from Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria, and is structured in four sections, covering the following themes: • languages in contact • language identity, ideology and policy • communication and issues of intelligibility • language in education The volume discusses the linguistic paradoxes and complexities that have emerged from the contact between English, (and/or) French and indigenous African languages. Some of the papers collected here discuss the characteristics, functions and peculiarities of the emerging varieties of languages that have developed in these post-colonial African States. Furthermore, the book offers empirical data on up-to-date research drawn from the expertise of budding and established scholars in the areas under discussion, and demonstrates the rich body of research that is developing in post-colonial Africa. Some of the areas covered in this volume include the linguistic products of bilingualism in Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, and new linguistic and sociocultural borders of Cameroonian Pidgin-Creole, which bridge the ideological gap between English and French speaking communities in Cameroon, unofficial language policy and language planning in the country and discourse choices in Cameroonian English. This book is an ideal resource for graduate students and researchers interested in the areas of sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, discourse analysis and World Englishes.