Other People's Shit (and Pee!) - Duke University Press

A G A I N S T the D A Y

Alison Kafer

Other People’s Shit (and Pee!)

I have no problems sharing a restroom with transgender individuals. I have a major problem sharing a public restroom with people (usually men) who don’t put the seat down or who drip or splatter on the floor.—Joann

A fine restaurant here recently altered the signs on its two single-user restrooms from Men and Women to read Anybody and Everybody. Unfortunately, one result is that they are both now filthy, with urine splashed on the floor. I don’t go there anymore for that reason.—Ellen

Joann’s and Ellen’s comments (New York Times 2015) are not new or unusual in conversations about all-gender bathrooms, even among feminists;1 years ago on WMST-L (an international women’s studies listserv), there was a dis-cussion of all-gender restrooms that similarly turned on the question of filth: men, apparently, are messy and out of control, pissing everywhere but inside the toilet bowl, while women are clean and tidy. I imagine many of us have watched this assumption play out in daily life: a small cluster of women waits to use the single-stall restroom marked Women, while the Men’s single-stall restroom remains empty; the women remark to one another that they don’t want to go in the men’s room because they know it’s dirty; knowing laughter ensues (and the wait continues).

I’m struck by the multiple layers of bias in these interactions: the adher-ence to binary systems of sex and gender; the assertion of essentialized gen-der roles and behaviors (men are dirty, women are clean); the assumption

The South Atlantic Quarterly 115:4, October 2016 doi 10.1215/00382876-3656158 © 2016 Duke University Press

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756 The South Atlantic Quarterly • Against the Day • October 2016

that the ones hearing or reading these comments are not the ones cleaning the bathrooms; the implication that transgender women are really/still men (conflating trans access to restrooms with men’s presence in restrooms); and the deflection of trans and genderqueer access to public restrooms (having “no problems sharing a restroom with transgender individuals,” but priori-tizing [cis]women’s access to clean restrooms). Why focus on the need for restrooms that are safe and accessible for all—the subject of the newspaper article to which Joann and Ellen were responding—when there is (men’s) piss on the floor?

The piss on the floor concerns me, too, although not in the same way that it does these commenters. Why does the conversation about all-gender bathrooms turn so frequently to the topic of dirt, filth, and hygiene (see figure 1)? How is it that such claims are seen as justifying the continued practice of gender-segregated spaces, even though such spaces actively exclude trans, genderqueer, and gender-nonconforming people? What can we learn from the assumption that these assertions are simply common sense? As Tanya Titch-kosky (2011: 73) argues, “Justification is not second order to the fact of exclu-sion; . . . it is how we do exclusion as well as generate its everyday sensibility.”

Figure 1. Unititled. Courtesy of Julie Avril Minich

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This particular justification—gender-segregated bathrooms are neces-sary to shield women from male filth—is closely related to the other main justification for maintaining gender-segregated bathrooms, the need to pro-tect women from male violence. As opponents of the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance put it, creating all-gender restrooms or allowing transgender peo-ple to use the restrooms consistent with their gender expression “would allow troubled men to enter women’s public bathrooms, showers and locker rooms. This would violate [women’s] privacy and put them in harm’s way”2 (Moyer 2015). Both justifications—dirt, violence—cast (cis)women and (cis)girls as in need of protection from men, a protection best offered through gender-segregated spaces. They rely, in other words, on the assumption that all women are, at core, the same and that with that sameness comes safety.

Yet—as many of us know all too well—the women’s room has never been a site of safety or privacy for all women: transwomen and gender-non-conforming people are policed and harassed; disabled women find them-selves the objects of invasive curiosity; homeless women are shunned or thrown out; women of color are met with scrutiny and suspicion, especially in predominantly white spaces; women wearing hijabs are greeted with hos-tile stares; fat women encounter murmurs and looks of disgust; and so on. In other words, there are many people who do not experience women-only spaces or rooms full of women as necessarily or inherently safe; a little piss on the floor is the least of their worries when entering the loo.

I usually enter women’s rooms with a mixture of anxiety and dread. These feelings are certainly driven by the inaccessibility of much of the built landscape: regardless of the presence or absence of an “access” sign, will the bathroom be architecturally accessible to my wheelchair? But my anxiety and dread are also motivated by years of experiences with a more attitudinal inaccessibility, and it is this manifestation of ableism that makes bathrooms feel like anything but safe havens of sameness. I am often confronted with stares, intrusive questions, and counterproductive offers of “help” in the bathroom, all of which remind me that I don’t belong. But even more anxiety producing is the state of the stall itself: contrary to Joann’s and Ellen’s asser-tions, the women’s wheelchair toilet is often covered in piss, full of shit, and stopped up with toilet paper; paper seat covers linger half on, half off the seat. The sign may say accessible, but the reality is anything but.

The ableist reading of this scenario would be that disabled people are messy, but the reality is a lot more complicated. There are undoubtedly peo-ple with illnesses or impairments that make it difficult for them to control the flow of their urine, increase the likelihood that they will need to defecate

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in public, or make maneuvering the flush handle difficult. But most of the piss and shit I encounter in public restrooms comes from people who choose to piss on the seat or leave the toilet full of their waste, all in the name of “cleanliness.” In the interest of protecting themselves from “germs,” they have chosen to hover over the toilet bowl or avoid the flush handle.3 And this “cleanliness” is, for women like Joann and Ellen, part of the safety and com-fort they associate with women-only spaces, but it is a cleanliness and com-fort forged in a stunning lack of concern for others. What illustrates egocen-tric individualism better than the act of hovering?

I remember my mother instructing me to “hover” in public restrooms so that I wouldn’t have to sit on the toilet seat (I still had the ability to squat then); my students report receiving the same advice from their relatives and friends. Whether I pissed on the seat in the process was irrelevant—all that mattered was that I kept my body at a “safe” remove from the toilet—besides, any other person using the toilet was surely going to hover, too. Paper seat covers were a possible alternative, but they weren’t always available, they were slippery, and they required one’s hands to get perilously close to touch-ing the toilet. Better to hover.

Perhaps it isn’t surprising that the public toilet is charged with anxiety about germs and dirt: restrooms are, by definition, sites of bodily waste and its accompanying sounds and smells. As Ruth Barcan (2010) explains, this “dirtiness” is heightened by the fact that public toilets contain the bodily waste of others, so that we imagine the flush handle or toilet seat as being contaminated by their touch. Yet Barcan notes that this fear is not really grounded in reality; computer keyboards and telephones are often far more “germy” than toilet seats or faucets. As a result, she explains: “When I hear of people afraid to touch a tap, I think less of real germs than of the fear of the other. Prohibitions on touching objects—whatever their microbiological basis, sound or otherwise—inevitably involve a fear of touching the body of another, even by proxy. . . . Surely fear of ‘the prewarmed seat’ is less a ratio-nally grounded fear of infection than a fear of the touch of the stranger” (36).

This “fear of the touch of the stranger” motivates much of what hap-pens in and around public restrooms. Women hover so as not to touch the seat, leaving behind splatters of piss; people refuse to touch the flush handle, leaving their piss, paper, and shit in the bowl. Both practices make it more difficult for people who lack the muscles or bodily configuration to hover to use the toilet; they may also make it more difficult for those who need the toilet to empty catheter bags or need the stall to perform medical procedures. (And if the typical multistall restroom has only one “accessible” stall, and

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that stall is rendered unusable, then the person needing an accessible stall must now find another bathroom on a different floor, in a different building, on a different block, etc.) Concerns about the smells of others, or about oth-ers encountering one’s own smell, lead to chemical “air fresheners” that can make restrooms dangerous for those with chemical sensitivities or breath-ing difficulties. And all of these practices prioritize the “cleanliness,” “com-fort,” and “safety” of the individual user over the people tasked with cleaning the bathrooms; the latter are literally unimaginable in a bathroom politics that sees safety in sameness and danger in difference (men are dirty, toilets are full of other people’s germs, and unseen others clean it up while “we” women can hover safely above it all). Can we instead imagine a different potty politics, one less focused on individualism and detachment and more invested in the multiplicity of bodies and minds in the loo?

One of the sites for such explorations has been the signage posted out-side public restrooms (indeed, the comments that begin this essay were in response to an article about such signs). Once we move beyond the Men and Women signs, with gendered stick figures to match, what else might we imagine? What kinds of coalitions do different terms or images make pos-sible, and what kinds of coalitions do they foreclose?

I spend a lot of time fantasizing about bathroom signage, and I have to admit that my thoughts don’t always come from a coalitional or feminist/queer/crip space. The fantasies often come when I’m in the airport trying to squeeze a bathroom break in between flights and I find myself waiting (and waiting, and waiting, . . .) for someone to vacate the accessible stall while I look longingly at all the empty inaccessible stalls around me.4 At those moments, the imagined sign goes something like “Does your body fit in the other stalls? Then why are you in this one?,” or “Not disabled? Then make room for those who are,” or, as my departure time gets closer and my bladder fuller, “For disabled people only.”

Although in my more desperate moments I do find myself wishing there were some way to get nondisabled people to stop using the accessible stalls in multistall restrooms when the other stalls are empty, I don’t really want to place yet another layer of surveillance on the public toilet. Bathrooms are already sites of surveillance and exclusion, where those who don’t belong are kept out. Insisting that wide stalls are “for disabled people only” would likely increase such practices, encouraging users to monitor the bodies of others for signs of “legitimate” use. As Ellen Samuels (2014: 126–40) reveals in her analysis of parking spaces, such policing relies on ableist assumptions about what “disability” looks like; harassment of those deemed insufficiently

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disabled by passersby is common, and there are even websites where people can report “illegitimate” users. I don’t want the same for bathroom stalls.

So I keep trying: “If you don’t need the grab bars for balance, aren’t traveling with an infant or small children, or don’t need the extra room to accommodate the size of your body or wheelchair or to perform medical pro-cedures, you are taking this space away from those who do.” Although it’s a bit long for a bathroom sign, this option recognizes that there are many dif-ferent reasons one might need the larger stall, thereby refusing the abled/disabled binary and expanding ideas of access and accessibility. (It also makes room for a much more complex range of stick figures.) But it still doesn’t go far enough toward imagining the kinds of bathroom coalitions that many of us think are possible.5 This checklist approach to belonging suggests that some uses and users are authorized while others are not.

My sister and brother-in-law have a cross-stitched sign in their guest bathroom that gets closer, in that the text focuses on the person outside rather than the person inside: “Who waits outside the door / One may never know / So tarry not my friend / He too may have to go.” Here, in contrast to the disregard of future users inherent in hovering and splattering, the cur-rent user is encouraged to remember that the space of the toilet is always (to be) shared. A similar sentiment is found in another cross-stitched sign I remember encountering as a kid: a cross-stitched image of a stick figure in a flowery bathroom accompanied by the text, “If you sprinkle when you tinkle, please be neat and wipe the seat.” Explicitly pedagogical, both of these signs were undoubtedly intended to normalize behavior in ways far beyond the space of the toilet, and they unabashedly present the bathroom as a site of self- and other-surveillance.6 At the same time, they do refuse the individual-ist approach inherent in hovering and imagine the toilet as a site of collec-tive, shared use.

What might a poster campaign look like that takes this kind of imag-ining further, one that encourages us to embrace the presence of the other who came before us and the other who will come after (and even the other who might be in the space with us at the same time)? Can we imagine new signs not only for outside the door, marking what kind of space it is, but also a sign or signs inside the door, acknowledging and even embracing the kinds of acts that might take place in the space? A poster or series of post-ers that helps us remember that bodies come in all sizes and configura-tions, that bathrooms are sites of many different kinds of activities and prac-tices, that other people always need to be able to use the same toilets we do. Signs that remind us that “safety,” “comfort,” and “cleanliness” are often

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codes for exclusions, for casting other people as dirty and out of place. Signs addressing access as being not only about the space but also about how we relate in the space together, to one another, to the technologies and equip-ment in the space. Signs that offer revolution.

Notes

I thank Julie Avril Minich, Dana Newlove, Banu Subramaniam, and Kathi Weeks for their wise insights into this topic and help with this essay. 1 The commenters were responding to Aimee Lee Ball’s article “The Symbols of Change”

(2015), which discussed initiatives to increase gender access to public restrooms in spaces across the United States.

2 Opponents were successful in defeating the 2015 measure, in large part because of their fearmongering over bathrooms. One television ad showed a male stranger hiding in a bathroom stall in the women’s room; when a young light-skinned schoolgirl entered the restroom, he followed her into another stall, closing the door behind them. Some oppo-nents went so far as to dub the law the “Sexual Predator Protection Act,” continuing a long history of representing trans and genderqueer people as dangerously deviant in order to obscure (cis)male violence. For an account of the law’s defeat, see Moyer 2015.

3 Some have suggested kick-pedal flush handles as an alternative, but these presume a high level of mobility and balance; others favor automatic flushing systems, but, as Irus Braverman (2010: 72) explains, these presume “a standard person with more or less standard needs engaged in an anticipated standard behavior. So it is a single individual (not with a helper or child, for example) making a single bowel movement (rather than a series) or making typical movements in a stall (not preparing for an injection, for example).” As a wheelchair user who moves horizontally onto and off a toilet rather than vertically, I typically trigger two to four flushes per piss, wasting water (and often being splashed) in the process. Automation is often a tool of normalization.

4 Although commercial planes come equipped with toilets, they only accommodate cer-tain bodies, regardless of what the signs may say.

5 My bathroom dreams will always be indebted to Simone Chess, Jessi Quizar, and Matt Richardson (Chess et al. 2004).

6 The text in my sister’s sign, for example, is illustrated with heavily gendered stick fig-ures, making clear that the waiting “he” is anything but generic: there are three femi-ninized stick figures “tarrying” (putting on makeup, primping, and lounging in the tub), while a masculine stick figure “waits outside the door.”

References

Ball, Aimee Lee. 2015. “The Symbols of Change.” Sunday Styles, New York Times, November 8.Barcan, Ruth. 2010. “Dirty Spaces: Separation, Concealment, and Shame in the Public Toilet.”

In Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing, edited by Harvey Molotch and Laura Norén, 25–41. New York: New York University Press.

Braverman, Irus. 2010. “Potty Training: Nonhuman Inspection in Public Washrooms.” In Molotch and Norén, Toilet, 65–86.

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Chess, Simone, et al. 2004. ‘‘Calling All Restroom Revolutionaries!’’ In That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, edited by Mattilda, aka Matt Bernstein Sycamore, 189–206. Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull.

Moyer, Justin. 2015. “Why Houston’s Gay Rights Ordinance Failed: Fear of Men in Women’s Bathrooms.” Washington Post, November 4. www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning -mix/wp/2015/11/03/why-houstons-gay-rights-ordinance-failed-bathrooms.

New York Times. 2015. “Comments.” Sunday Styles, November 15.Samuels, Ellen. 2014. Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race. New York: New York

University Press.Titchkosky, Tanya. 2011. “‘Where?’: To Pee or Not to Pee.” In The Question of Access: Disability,

Space, Meaning, 69–91. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

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