Queering Bathrooms: Gender, Sexuality, and the Hygienic Imagination (review)

Just what happens in public bathrooms? Despite the fact that everyone uses them at one point or another, Sheila Cavanagh argues in Queering Bathrooms, academics have long underestimated the social complexity of public bathrooms by assuming they are “out of scholarly bounds” (p. 4). Given that much homophobic and transphobic violence takes place in public lavatories, Queering Bathrooms asks about the factors that have led to gender-segregated public bathrooms and argues that the cultural logic behind that segregation may provoke attacks on LGBTI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans-gender, and intersex) people. Using the personal testimonies of 100 LGBTI interviewees in Canada and the United States, alongside insights from numerous critical perspectives, Cavanagh demonstrates how LGBTI people “become shit” (p. 50) in public bathrooms.

Queering Bathrooms turns a critical eye on gender segregation in public lavatories largely by employing insights from queer theory and trans studies. The author also draws on critical disability and critical race studies as they apply to the mediation of gender “by dis/ability, ‘race,’ and class” (p. 26). More ubiquitous than either of these critical perspectives is Cavanagh’s use of psychoanalysis. The reader’s familiarity with psychoanalysis is never assumed, however: Cavanagh often gives brief overviews of psychoanalytic concepts and perspectives before employing them.

The central argument of Queering Bathrooms pivots on the claim that there is a “hygienic imagination” and that “the bathroom—as a geography containing stray fluids, sounds, and smells—is felt to upset gender and subject integrity” (p. 48). In other words, when we perform urinary and excretory functions, we have a sense of our bodies “falling apart.” In Cavanagh’s view, we often react aggressively and violently to variant bodies in public bathrooms because they do not conform to the sense of bodily integrity we desperately seek to maintain in these spaces.

Despite what the title might suggest, Queering Bathrooms tends more toward a trans studies perspective than toward what Cavanagh deems sexuality studies or queer theory. While Cavanagh uses both queer theory and trans studies to probe the cultural logic behind what constitutes the “whole” or “normal” body, she actively differentiates these two approaches in her introduction, noting the former’s emphasis on “desire and sexuality” and the latter’s emphasis on “sexed embodiment and gender identity” (p. 19). Although insights from notable queer theorists appear throughout Queering Bathrooms, the study of specifically queer experiences of public bathrooms is largely limited to the text’s final chapter. On whole, Queering Bathrooms lays out the ways in which public lavatories promote gender-based surveillance and often highlight transgender-specific differences.

Despite this emphasis on gender, the text’s relationship with feminist perspectives is ambiguous. Feminist theorists may find interesting Cavanagh’s argument on how “dimorphic urinary positions” (p. 128) lead women to “feel vulnerable in the stall, as men are expected to assume a potent and aggressive stance before the urinal” (p. 129). However, there is only a brief mention of feminist concerns about the threat of sexual violence in bathroom settings. Although Cavanagh acknowledges arguments that “women have legitimate fears of assault” (p. 73) in non-gender-segregated public bathrooms, she rebuts this claim with the suggestion that such discourse obscures—and may, in fact, promote—the harassment and violence that trans people regularly face. Queering Bathrooms counterpoints the dominant narrative of safety in gender-segregated bathrooms by documenting the harassment and violence numerous trans interviewees have experienced for being in the “wrong” bathroom.

How the legal regulation of sex and gender may play into their cultural regulation is never directly addressed in Queering Bathrooms. While Cavanagh mentions high-profile cases involving public bathrooms and gender- or sexuality-based violence (pp. 3–4, 8–9), she also notes the surprising lack of laws governing who can and cannot use a bathroom (pp. 70–72) and the over-vigilant policing of gay male “public indecency” in bathrooms (pp. 195–98). Although explicit legal issues remain tangential to the arguments made in the...