(Dis)ordered Spaces? Managing the Competing Rights of Children in the Gendered Space of the School Toilet (original) (raw)
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This text-based essay investigates and makes uncertain public toilets through ficto-critical writing. The essay is a response to an experimental analysis where I vacantly occupied several public toilets around Melbourne, each for varied amounts of time. This embodied methodology allows the interior itself, relieved of any expected utility or function, to become foregrounded, eventful. The research builds on an existing body of research into the interior subcultures of public toilets and their representation in pop culture. ‘Vacantly occupied’ refers to the process of occupying toilet cubicles and making uncertain the binary of ‘vacant’ and ‘occupied’. To vacantly occupy queers the binary function of the cubicle lock, the toilet, design, and labour more broadly, and turns it into an open-ended situation. ‘Queering’ because it blurs categorisation — occupation without an occupation — and embodies a functional, utilitarian space in a deliberately a-functional way, as opposed to dysfunctional because design too often looks towards explicit function as reification of ‘good/bad’. I argue this kind of majoritarian binary qualification isn’t necessarily useful for queering, which unlike identitarian definitions of ‘queer’ resists certainty. This text deploys queering tactically to move beyond these dynamics in order to destabilise and make uncertain in both content and form, thinking design in different ways. Ficto-criticism is used as a methodology to develop two distinct perspectives: the author’s, and through its diverse language loosens normative interpretations of critical writing for the reader, creating a second. The style, much like toilet cubicles themselves, is at times messy, fragmented, and blurred, mixing academic, dirty, common, poetic styles attempting to resist cartographic objectivity in favour of a language that cultivates multiple perspectives that queer the form of a critical research essay. This is reflective of a broader argument that, in the case of public toilets, other viewpoints beyond dominant heterosexist norms are needed now more than ever, that other historiographies and perspectives that create uncertainty in how we assume, use, and design with logics, utility, function, cleanliness, and so on can be embraced to envision radically different interiors.
Toilets as a feminist issue: A true story
Berkeley Women's LJ, 1990
One can measure the degree of equality between the sexes in America by its public toilets. As a child growing up, I remember that most public toilets for women had pay stalls. It often cost a nickel or even a dime to relieve yourself in a public toilet. There may have been one or even two free stalls, but they often were filthy and usually lacked toilet tissue. Comparing notes with a male contemporary, I was surprised to learn that there were pay stalls in the men's bathroom, but the urinals were free. Thus, women were penalized because no one had created the "feminine" equivalent of a urinal. 2 If women ventured outside the home and were forced by circumstances to relieve themselves, they had to keep nickels, dimes, and tissue handy. The situation was even worse for women of color t !Professor of Law, University of Maryland. I would like to thank Marley Weiss, Mary Coombs, Kathy Abrams, Regina Austin, and Jana Singer for their comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this article. I also want to thank Robin West, Judy Scales-Trent, Mari Matsuda, Patricia Williams, Lani Guinier, and many others who read earlier drafts, for their words of support and encouragement. I am especially grateful to Richard Delgado, who first thought my initial article worth publishing. Of course, I take full responsibility for the content, shape, and direction of this article, so only my professional reputation is on the line. Finally, I dedicate this article to all the women whose laughter caused me to realize that this article is perhaps deviant, but not a crazy idea. 1 This is an edited version of an essay which first appeared in Baculus, Publication of the Student Bar Association of the University of Tulsa College of Law, 10 (Oct 1988) (see note 17 and accompanying text). 2 In fact, someone has invented a device, Le Funelle, a folded and biodegradable paper funnel with handles and tissue. The inventor, a woman, claims the device is the answer to women's concerns about contracting diseases from toilet seats. "It is for those times when sitting is simply out of the question, squatting is too difficult, and paper seat covers are either unavailable or too awkward." Gregg Levoy, Stanech: Stand-Up Women, Omni Mag 114 (Jan 1988). The inventor, Lore Harp, was not successful in marketing her product. Radio stations would not accept the ad because they claimed it violated their program standards; many magazines refused to carry the ad; and drugstores and mass merchants who were afraid that the product might offend customers refused to carry the product. Paul Brown, Mission Impossible?, Inc. 109 (Jan 1989). More recently, Kathie Jones obtained a patent for a female urinal called the "She-inal." US Patent 4,985,940 (Jan 22, 1991). Ms. Jones has started a company called Urinette, Inc. to manufacture the urinal. Edward Gunts, For Relief of Women, "Female Urinal" Considered for New Stadium, Bait Sun A1 (Jan 25, 1991).
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This article analyzes two recent works by transgender performance artist Cassils, PISSED and Fountain (2017), which were created in response to the Trump administration's decision to rescind federal protections allowing transgender students to use the restroom of their choice. While Cassils primarily conceptualized PISSED/Fountain as a queering of binary, essentialist understandings of gendered embodiment, I draw on performance, queer, and critical ethnic studies to illustrate that these pieces simultaneously challenge other kinds of oppositional embodiments, particularly health versus disease and citizen versus alien and/or terrorist; conceptualizations the state frequently deploys to surveil and control marginalized populations. PISSED/Fountain offer audiences a new strategy for both exposing and contesting state violence: these pieces can be read as a politically strategic disidentification with the state's classification of certain bodies and their excretions as "deviant" and "toxic" in order to purposefully "terrorize" the state's bio-and necropolitical aims.
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