Equal but Separate? Organizing Gender, Materiality, and Sexuality in Public Restrooms in the United States

• In Event: 306 - Section on Sociology of Sexualities Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 04. Marginalization

Abstract

Over the last century, the decline of gender segregation has been one of the most striking transformations to the social organization of public life in the United States. This shift has been documented in spheres ranging from the labor market to political participation, yet it persists in one major aspect of the built environment – and one that is often marginalized in academic scholarship: public restrooms. Although the physical separation of men’s and women’s restrooms is pervasive, such a configuration is neither natural nor inevitable. The very first public restrooms in the nineteenth century were unisex by design, and today, gender-inclusive restrooms are emerging in many universities and cultural institutions. My dissertation thus asks two related questions. First, why do most public restrooms remain persistently gender-segregated? And second, what explains restroom de-gendering?

Using a mixed-method approach, I argue that, far from being a peripheral social space, restrooms are central sites through which contentious debates about the meaning of gender difference and sexuality have long been filtered. Although much about gender has indeed changed in recent decades, my analysis demonstrates that the cultural logics underlying the gender separation of restrooms have remained unusually static over time and across a diversity of institutional settings. When the legal, educational, and architectural institutions I study make decisions about how to allocate restrooms, they tend to reject rational calculations about maximizing efficiency or minimizing cost; instead, they overwhelmingly rely upon deeply affective ideas about gender, privacy, and above all, heterosexuality to guide their organizational work.

Author

• Alexander Davis, Princeton University