Queering Bathrooms: Gender, Sexuality, and the Hygienic Imagination

by Sheila L. Cavanagh

The intersection of public washrooms and gender has become increasingly politicized in recent queer and trans folk have been harassed for allegedly using the 'wrong' washroom, while widespread campaigns have advocated for more gender-neutral facilities. In Queering Bathrooms , Sheila L. Cavanagh explores how public toilets demarcate the masculine and the feminine and condition ideas of gender and sexuality. Based on 100 interviews with GLBT and/or intersex peoples in major North American cities, Cavanagh delves into the ways that queer and trans communities challenge the rigid gendering and heteronormative composition of public washrooms. Incorporating theories from queer studies, trans studies, psychoanalysis, and the work of Michel Foucault, Cavanagh argues that the cultural politics of excretion is intimately related to the regulation of gender and sexuality. Public toilets house the illicit and act as repositories for the social unconscious. Also offering suggestions for imagining a more inclusive public washroom, Queering Bathrooms asserts that although toilets are not typically considered within traditional scholarly bounds, they form a crucial part of our modern understanding of sex and gender.

Genres: Queer, Nonfiction, Gender, Sexuality, Queer Studies, LGBT, Gender Studies

304 pages, Paperback

First published October 28, 2010

Reviews

[Alok Vaid-Menon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some quite helpful psychoanalytic and phenomenological work in this to understand anti-trans violence. Cavanagh traces the historical construction of bathrooms and how and why they came to be divided on the basis of sex and in doing so she reveals how there has been a "metonymic relationship between gender variance, danger, dirt, and disease" (6). Visible gender non-conformity / ambiguity gets perceived as a form of dirtiness -- and by extension, trans and gender non-conforming people are projected as abject entities that have to be discarded in order for modernity to function. The gender binary works to maintain the fiction of the contained, enveloped self. Trans and gender non-conforming people, then, reveal the presumably natural contours of how society delineates the human form to be fictional. We shatter the myth of the stable, enclosed body and reveal the alterability of what people presume to be fixed and static. In order to re-assemble this self-conception, purging gender non-conformity and repelling visibly trans people becomes essential.