Abstract
While public toilets are a necessity of public life, their association with human waste, germs, gender performance, and sexuality render them a treacherous subject for public discussion as well as academic discourse. However, the history, design, and social policies surrounding public toilets provide distinct insights into patterns of gender and cultural inequality. With their edited volume Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender, Olga Gershenson and Barbara Penner make an essential contribution to this burgeoning area of inquiry. Its primary aim is “to provide a cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural platform for the study of public toilets and gender” (p. 22). Toward that end, this collection includes contributions from the fields of art, architecture, urban planning, graphic design, history, film, cultural studies, women’s studies, and queer studies. It also addresses specific locales in North America, Europe, Africa, Australia, and Asia.
Gershenson and Penner begin this volume with a deft and thorough introduction to existing sociological, anthropological, psychoanalytic, architectural, and queer theoretical approaches to public toilets and gender as well as a succinct discussion of their representation in art, film, and literature. The remainder of the volume is made up of 16 chapters that are divided into two parts. Part one, “Potty Politics: Toilets, Gender and Identity,” addresses gendered sociohistorical, public policy, public health, and cross-cultural concerns while part two, “Toilet Art: Design and Cultural Representations” interrogates how hegemonic gender and cultural order can be revealed, reinforced, or undermined through architecture, design, art, mass media, and literature. The book ends with an afterword by filmmaker Peter Greenaway.
Several important themes emerge out of this collection of essays. One is safety. For example, in chapter 1 Clara Greed demonstrates that the United Kingdom’s diminishing and poorly maintained public restrooms affect women’s individual and public health. With chapter 2, Kathryn Anthony and Meghan Dufresne address how sex segregated bathrooms pose physical dangers to unaccompanied children and people with disabilities. In chapter 14, Frances Pheasant-Kelly analyzes how popular cinema reflects American anxiety about public bathrooms as sites of male humiliation, rape, and other violence. Finally, Claudia Mitchell’s powerful ethnographic work with school children in Swaziland and Rwanda (chapter 3) reveals that girls in her sample risked rape simply by using school toilets.
Hegemonic toilet and restroom design is another central theme. Cultural hegemony is thoroughly critiqued in Alison Moore’s explication of Western tourists’ apprehensive disdain for the squat toilets found in many parts of Africa and Asia (chapter 6). In chapter 8, Robin Lydenberg addresses the relationship of public toilets to the national hegemony of Britain and the Soviet Union through an analysis of installations by Dorothy Cross and Ilya Kabakov, respectively. In chapter 9, Barbara Penner presents a challenge to masculine gender hegemony of toilet design through a redesigned commode that allows women to urinate while standing; she suggests that this small bit of gender subversion is one piece of the undoing of dominant gender paradigms (p. 149).
The theme of visibility permeates this work. From the introduction onward, the reader is constantly reminded that one way marginalized populations are kept out of the public eye is through inadequate or nonexistent public toilet facilities. Examples include African Americans in the pre–civil rights U.S. south (pp. 6-7), middle- and upper-class women of late 19th- and early 20th-century cities in Europe, Britain, and Australia (pp. 5-6; chapter 4; chapter 9) and, until 1992, female U.S. senators (p. 9).
Given these themes of safety, hegemonic design, and visibility, it is surprising that transgender people’s concerns about safe, appropriately designed, and accessible public toilets receive only cursory attention in this volume. Although this issue is at the forefront of legal and public policy discussions as well as college campus politics, it is only addressed directly in the introduction and given a cursory mention in two other chapters. Because of this omission, Ladies and Gents inadvertently reinforces binary gender constructs: In doing so, it contributes to the very pattern of marginalization of an imperiled group that elsewhere it so passionately critiques and interrogates.
In spite of this omission, Ladies and Gents forms an important, remarkably diverse, and at times divergent collection of scholarship on a long neglected topic essential to gender studies. It clearly demonstrates that finding ways to engage in public discourse about public toilets will allow us a more nuanced and rigorous discussion of gender hegemony and inequality. Toward that end, this volume would be useful in graduate seminars, advanced undergraduate course work, or as an addition to any gender researcher’s library.