Water and Toilets: Public Restrooms as Infrastructural Issues

As we've learned in class, infrastructure makes new subjects as part of its biopolitical logics. As toilets and restrooms are built, they are implicated within disciplining rubrics with particular discursively constructed subjects in mind. In particular, this blogpost seeks to examine the phenomena of all-gender restrooms as part of a study of infrastructure. As Harvey Molotch says in Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing, "peeing is political".  The very construction of restrooms as gender-segregated is part of the ways in which gender is policed and surveilled in engineering intentions. On an architectural level, the role of gendered restrooms also already establishes public restrooms as homosocial environments that presumably reinscribe notions of heteronormative gender roles. Presumably, all people who enter and utilize the women's restroom are heterosexual women while the men's restroom is presumed to only be used by heterosexual men. Other forms of sociality and traffic that transcend  these gender restrooms are strictly disciplined (e.g. children who do this at schools are punished), although they do exist (see: Jose Esteban Muñoz's discussion of cruising utopias as one example).

Following Professor Schwenkel's assertion that "no material resource and public good is more critical to sustaining urban life than water", how do we also think about public restrooms as inherently part of the sustenance of urban life, as part of an infrastructural issue?

As access to clean water is desired as part of urban life to maintain clean bodies and spaces, the use of toilets, public and private, rely on the delivery and circulation of water to expel wastes like urine and stool out of the body and into the plumbing systems. This mechanization of our bodily functions can be argued to be part of an anatamo-politics where individuals subject themselves to particular disciplinary movements in order to acquire a heightened ability. In this regard, the discipline that one undergoes to use and rely on toilets to expel bodily functions makes them into a new subject as part of modernizing, civilizing, and disciplinary projects. In this way, we can see that using toilets requires discipline. And that discipline creates a distinct relationship not only to toilets, but the entire infrastructural reliance on energy and water for the creation of buildings broadly and restrooms specifically.

An additional thing to consider is also the role that gender-segregated restrooms have on people who experience life within a gendered spectrum--those folks who identify as gender variant, gender non-conforming, or trans*. Taking the figures of gender variant, gender non-conforming, and trans* peoples, it is important to understand that the strictly gendered policing of restrooms render visible how peeing is very much a political issue, as workers who identify in these ways have a much harder time finding restrooms that make them feel comfortable and safe in that often leads them to feeling uncomfortable and holding their bodily needs until they have the time to access a safe restroom. There has been research performed that details how gender nonconforming people experience significant amounts of discrimination for simply using the restroom. There have also been a number of stories where trans women of color have been attacked in public restrooms as well. If peeing is considered a necessity and constructing buildings that supply the basic supply of energy and water for bathrooms are part of this process, then the construction of gender-neutral or gender-segregated restrooms are inherently part of the politics of infrastructure.

Currently, actually, there is a policy within UCOP's facilities manual that requires all newly constructed UC-owned buildings to also provide gender-inclusive facilities, with specific attention to gender-inclusive restrooms. I actually saw this happening during my time at UC Davis where the newly built Student Community Center, prized and featured on many diversity outreach websites and brochures, included a number of gender-inclusive restrooms.

As part of UC Davis' initiative to centralize the different extent cultural centers into one main building (e.g. LGBT Resource Center, Student Recruitment and Retention Center, Cross Cultural Center, Women's Research and Resources Center, the Undocumented Student Resource Center and the Undergraduate Research Center), this building quickly became a spectacle that was meant to incite and inspire awe, a sense of enchantment. Not only was it the newest built building on the UC Davis campus in the center of campus, the building itself was heralded as a bastion of the university's commitment to multiculturalism and diversity. As part of this awe, the gender-inclusive facilities found in this building also aided as a materialization of UC Davis' commitment to gender-diversity as well. In so doing, the creation of gender-inclusive restrooms functioned not only to facilitate a different relationship to restrooms; it also facilitated the creation of UC Davis' institutional culture that was also mediated through relations of capital, (inter)national politics, and technical knowledge. The construction of the Student Community Center and the inclusive construction of gender-inclusive restrooms within the campus building is then premised on the effective delivery of water and energy, alongside the continued maintenance of these buildings with wage staff.

Just as we think through how restrooms can open up our analysis of different kinds of culture and production of space, I hope that we have also begin to conceptualize and situate restrooms within our conversations of water, governmentality, and creation of space/place/institution.

Works Cited

Ford, Zack. "STUDY: Transgender People Experience Discrimination Trying To Use Bathrooms." ThinkProgress RSS. Think Progress, 26 June 2013. Web. 23 Feb. 2016.

James, Robin. "Juridical, Disciplinary, and Biopolitical Power: Basic Background on Foucault." YouTube. YouTube, n.d. Web. 23 Feb. 2016.

Molotch, Harvey Luskin, and Laura Norén. Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing. New York: New York UP, 2010. Print.

Schwenkel, Christina. "Spectacular Infrastructure and Its Breakdown in Socialist Vietnam." American Ethnologist 42.3 (2015): 520-34. Web.

UCOP. "Construction Services." RD4.1: Providing Gender Inclusive Facilities. UCOP, 30 June 2015. Web. 23 Feb. 2016.