Bathroom
by
Colloquially and perhaps paradoxically, the term bathroom does not primarily refer to a space of bathing. In fact, one typically looks for a bathroom less to get clean than to deposit the stuff from which one must be cleansed. The bathroom is a waste space, a place where excretion is hidden away but also deeply governed. For millennia, innumerable spoken and unspoken rules have constrained who and when and how one can use the bathroom. But those rules have also been contested. As such, bathrooms are spaces of refuse and refusal. They are political spaces and spaces of possibility. As a mix of social practices and material structures, the bathroom has long been a subject of study in history and architecture, law and philosophy, cultural studies and gender and sexuality studies. As a result, bathroom literature is as rich in content as it is in methodology. Here, I take just one path through that landscape. I pair critical phenomenology (Guenther 2019), which attends to how our experiences are informed by our social practices and institutions, with critical genealogy (Koopman 2012), which tracks a term’s history in order not only to illuminate our present but also to reimagine our futures. When...
This essay may be found on page 23 of the printed volume.