The public school washroom as analytic space for troubling gender: investigating the spatiality of gender through students' self-knowledge

Abstract

This paper derives from a larger study, looking at how students in one secondary school in Ontario problematised and understood gender expression. This study applies a Foucaultian analytic framework of disciplinary space to the problem of the bathroom in public schools. It focuses specifically on the surveillance and regulation of gendered bodies within such a space. How young people understand the surveillance of their bodily presence is significant in terms of how they are constituted as a gendered subject. I use Foucault's [1977. Discipline and punish (translated by Alan Sheridan). New York: Vintage Books, Random House, Inc; 1980. Power-knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972–1977 (Colin Gordon, ed.) (translated by Colin Gordon … [et al.]). Hassocks: Harvester Press] concept of subjectivation to investigate how a subject is formed through mechanisms of disciplinary power, as well as Butler's [1990. Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge] gender performativity theory to trouble the notion of gender in non-binary, unfixed terms. Additionally, the public toilet space itself can be theorised using queer theory and trans studies, particularly in terms of conceptualising the washroom as a regulated space.

Keywords:

• queer theory
• sociology
• embodiment
• identities
• heteronormativity
• visual methods

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful for the support of Dr Wayne Martino, supervisor and mentor, for his unfailing and always kind guidance. Although the original data preceded funding, the author is also grateful for the SSHRC CGS doctoral grant that supported the writing of this paper.

Notes

I conceive of the unisex/transgender washroom as a single stall unto itself, placed amongst the context of other single-sex washrooms (i.e. men's and women's) or as a third option between the standard sex-segregated collective washrooms. However, in interviewing, I did not define these particulars and so I know that some students probably envisioned a space that looked much like the current multiple stall washrooms they have in schools, with the adjustment that all sexes were allowed to use the space.