Bathrooms are spaces where the public and private collide in a most intimate manner that can reinforce or challenge our preconceived notions of gender, race, class, ability, and nationality.
The public toilet is a microcosm for identity politics as they play out across the world. We will examine how bathrooms reflect and perhaps help to construct the gender binary, and how trans and other non-normatively identified people negotiate those spaces, revealing the slippages and ambiguities in these 'natural' binary systems.
Bathrooms are places for competition and stereotyping, for consumption and waste. Since, as college students, the majority of bathrooms we use are public, the topic provides a unique opportunity to start discussions about the gendered spaces we all share.
This course engaged the campus community to think differently about bathrooms and how they impact our lives. The course used an often overlooked aspect of everyone's lives -- bathrooms -- as a launching point to explore issues of public and private spaces, representation, and activism.