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>> 61 2 PISSAR’s Critically Queer and Disabled Politics For most able-bodied cisgenders, public bathrooms are functional, unremarkable places for eliminating waste.1 They may be judged to be spacious or cramped, clean or dirty, plush or industrial, but they are generally unreflectively entered, used, and exited as part of one’s everyday routine. These places are not sites of interrogative and self-reflexive thought, at least not about the cultural logics of public bathrooms themselves. One may take the time afforded by this biological necessity to collect one’s thoughts, but public bathrooms typically are a short pit stop as one moves from one task to another. Put simply, for many, public bathrooms just are what they are: toilets, urinals, sinks, trashcans , and maybe a changing table. Accordingly, these naturalized places are seemingly immune from and irrelevant to the practice of politics and citizenship, although even a cursory review of the history of public bathrooms illuminates their fundamental importance to cultural figurations of the body politic. While it may be difficult for us to imagine a world filled with gender -neutral public bathrooms, we only need to look to the not-so-distant past to discover that sex-segregated public toilets are a thoroughly modern invention. In nineteenth-century Anglo-American culture, as Barbara Penner explains, Victorian morality and its “increasingly strict prohibition on bodily display and the emergence of a rigid ideology of gender,” as well as the capitalist production of women as consumers and workers outside the home, dictated the design of separate bathrooms for men and women.2 Of course, in the wake of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the need to accommodate consumers with children, we now have some gender-neutral bathrooms. Bathrooms designed for people with disabilities are marked by a sign 62 > 63 deep fears about sexual mixing, transgressing social boundaries, and ending recognition of gender differences.”6 Jane Sherron De Hart further explains that “sexual fears, compounded by and intertwined with racism,” created trepidation and confusion about the ERA’s goals and effects, although its ultimate impact on American opinions of the ERA appears to have been limited.7 Jane Mansbridge’s study of the defeat of the ERA, one well-supported by extensive polling data on the “potty issue,” concludes that “while this issue strengthened the morale of the [anti-ERA] activists, it had mixed results among the public and backfired in the legislatures.” As Mansbridge explains, in one survey polling ERA opponents, “less than 3 percent gave unisex toilets as either a first, second, or third reason for their opposition,” and another survey of the general public revealed 76 percent did not think the ERA would “increase the likelihood of integrated toilets.” With regard to the circulation of this argument in debates in state legislatures, “the issue served to solidify the conviction of middle-of-the-road legislators that the opposition was irrational.”8 In the end, the “potty issue” may not have been decisive in the defeat of the ERA, although it is often remembered as a pivotal issue. Indeed, the fact that it circulated at all speaks to gendered and racialized anxieties associated with public bathrooms. Taken together, these anecdotes demonstrate the inherently political nature of public bathrooms, even as their seeming banality encourages their users to eschew reflection on the underlying cultural logics of these public places. Far too often when we do discuss public bathrooms, the squeamishness initiated by the second term inhibits any serious reflection on the first, thus effectively securing current arrangements as they are to the great disadvantage of those who fail to see themselves or those who are not seen by others as welcome to use the facilities. In lieu of understanding public toilets as something instrumentally linked to the public sphere, a richer perspective views them as reciprocal forces in the figuration of publics and politics. Ruth Barcan does not overstate the case, then, when she directs our attention to the fact that public bathrooms are places where “we meet members of the public and where we interact with, and continually reproduce, an idea of the public.”9 Consequently, these public places reflect certain normativities, which are tenuously secured by a spatial ordering of citizens—an ordering just as capable of being remade as it is made. 64 > 65 on the floor or in conference committees. The provision even survived two vetoes by President Nixon, who objected to the overall cost of the programs authorized by the act...

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