Bawdy of the Bathroom
Sex-Segregated bathrooms have become such a firmly embedded part of our cultural architecture in the United States that many have come to think of them as a perfectly logical, or natural fixture of our society. They have become hotly contested in recent years as lawmakers attempt to enact restrictions on transgender and gender non-confroming people’s use of the bathroom that best matches their identity. Yet we rarely pause to ask ourselves how we got these neatly gendered fixtures in the first place? Who were they meant to serve, and under what pretense? Bawdy of the Bathroom traces women’s professed discomfort and fear of sexual endangerment in bathrooms back to their roots. When one plunges into this history, one can see that it is the “smallest room” that houses the most mammoth of ideologies. The bathroom is a prism that has both absorbed human social ideologies and angst and reflected them out in a magnified view.
Through a compelling combination of rigorous historical research and intimate personal storytelling this text will encourage readers to examine where this history lives in their bodies, as I locate for them where it lives in mine.
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