‘Getting in and going’: Access to onboard toilets for fat and disabled people on commercial aircraft
Bethan Evans, Rachel Colls, Stacy Bias
Abstract
• Toilets on commercial aircraft are inaccessible for fat and disabled passengers. Fat and disabled people have to dehydrate or fast to avoid needing the toilet. • These strategies are potentially harmful to their health. • Fat people are seen as illegitimate users of assistance for disabled passengers. • The paper calls for more accessible toilets on commercial flights. In this paper we explore the accessibility of toilets onboard commercial aircraft for passengers who identify as fat or fat and disabled. Drawing on qualitative survey and interview data, we discuss people’s experiences of inaccessible onboard toilet spaces including getting to and into the toilet, managing bodily matter, anticipating a lack of accessible toilets, and the (il)legitimacy of fat and disabled air passengers within commercial aircraft regulations. Our data illustrate that current provision of onboard toilets is wholly inadequate for fat and disabled passengers, requiring strategies to manage bodily matter which are detrimental to health. We further ‘fat geographies’ research and relational understandings of embodiment that attend to spatial and temporal contingency by drawing together insights from disability, crip, gender, queer and trans theory, in particular conceptualisations of ‘misfit(ting)’, crip time, and (il)legitimate lives.