Bathroom Battlegrounds: How Public Restrooms Shape the Gender OrderToday’s debates about transgender inclusion and public restrooms may seem unmistakably contemporary, but they have a surprisingly long and storied history in the United States—one that concerns more than mere “potty politics.” Alexander K. Davis takes readers behind the scenes of two hundred years’ worth of conflicts over the existence, separation, and equity of gendered public restrooms, documenting at each step how bathrooms have been entangled with bigger cultural matters: the importance of the public good, the reach of institutional inclusion, the nature of gender difference, and, above all, the myriad privileges of social status. Chronicling the debut of nineteenth-century “comfort stations,” twentieth-century mandates requiring equal-but-separate men’s and women’s rooms, and twenty-first-century uproar over laws like North Carolina’s “bathroom bill,” Davis reveals how public restrooms are far from marginal or unimportant social spaces. Instead, they are—and always have been—consequential sites in which ideology, institutions, and inequality collide. |
Other editions - View all
Bathroom Battlegrounds: How Public Restrooms Shape the Gender Order Alexander K. Davis Limited preview - 2020 |
Bathroom Battlegrounds: How Public Restrooms Shape the Gender Order Alexander K. Davis Limited preview - 2020 |
Common terms and phrases
American Journal American Sociological Review Annual Review architectural Bathroom Battlegrounds building Cambridge campus chapter Chicago Press cisgender City coeducational colleges and universities construction conversation court cultural decades discourse discrimination Diversity Dorms Equal Rights Amendment Erving Goffman everyday family restroom federal female Feminist fixtures Gender and Society gender difference gender identity gender ideologies gender separation gender-neutral housing Gendered Organizations Harvard Higher Education History inclusive Inequality infrastructure institutional accomplishment interactional interview Journal of Sociology Laud Humphreys LGBT LGBTQ LGBTQ center director male Max Weber moral organizational Organizational Ecology policies Politics potty parity Princeton professional public comfort stations public restrooms public toilets Queer renovation respondents restroom spaces restroom-related Review of Sociology sanitary Science Segregation sexual social sociologists sociology of gender structure tion tional transgender Undoing Gender ungendered restrooms United University of Chicago University Press Urban women workplace restrooms York