I was unable to present my institutional artifact project
in class so I made a PowerPoint with a vocal recording, on each slide, of me talking
through my presentation. I am very passionate about this topic so I decided to
put this project on my blog so I can share it with other people. I also wrote a
shortened script below that goes along with the PowerPoint just in case the PowerPoint
or audio doesn’t work.
Enjoy!
For
my institutional artifact project I looked at the symbols, history, and
ideologies behind gender segregated bathrooms. I did this through a critical
and gender perspective analyzing the privilege and oppression of gender
segregation, how it’s maintained, and why it exists in the first place.
For
gender nonconforming individuals, just walking through the door of a public
restroom can be stressful. Everyone should have the right to use a restroom
without fear of discrimination. Unisex restrooms are no more dangerous than
gender segregated bathrooms nor do they exclude any one person based on their
identity or appearance.
So
this is my claim:
These symbols, the facilities and
ideologies they represent, and the institutions that uphold and continue to use
them, force individuals to choose and assign themselves with hegemonic
definitions of gender. In other words, when institutions such as schools
(like Minnesota State University Mankato), businesses, restaurants, shopping
malls etc, choose to separate restrooms based on outdated notions of gender, it
forces Queer individuals, like myself, to conform to these notions whether we
assign ourselves as such or not. Basically, if we have to pee, we have to
decide to be either a man or a woman before doing so. We are constantly
reminded by these symbols that we are different, or “not normal.”
By
only having two gendered bathrooms, institutions are suppressing and
restricting opportunities and access within everyday life for genders that live
outside the norm. Just some of these gender identities include: agender,
androgynous individuals, bigenders, demigenders, gender fluids, gender queers,
gender neutrals, pangenders and many more. With all these gender
identities finally being recognized and talked about today, they are still
considered to be different and outside the societal norm.
Now I’m not saying that queer
individuals are the only ones who struggle with gender, people within the norm
have struggles as well. These traditional gender stereotypes listed above are
just some of the outdated notions of gender that are culturally programed into
us since birth. Meaning we lean gender from our culture, aka the (cultural
theory of learning gender). We are taught through our culture, (our families,
our schools, the media etc.), from a very young age that men are dominant and
women are submissive, women are gentle and men are tough, men are logical and
women are emotional, and so on and so forth.
As
we all know today these gender stereotypes, regardless if they are actually
true or not, are still common assumptions accepted today within our culture,
and Gender segregated bathrooms play a big role in why this keeps happening.
“The public restroom is the last everyday
social institution remaining in which separation by gender is considered to be
the norm, (Gerson, 2016)”.
The institutions that continue to
use these symbols, continue and reinforce, whether they are aware of it or not,
the outdated ideologies that put these symbols to use in the first place. The
standards, or popular notions, of gender are the main, if not the only reason
in creating and maintaining sex segregated bathrooms.
When
the ideology of separate circles for men and women, in public and private, in
the workforce, and in the home were dominant assumptions in society, the growth
of women’s presence in public life led to the desire to protect women from the
crude dangers of the patriarchal world. Patriarchal meaning the enforced belief
in male dominance and control within a society, (Pharr, 2001). An 1873 Supreme
Court case, Bradwell v. Illinois which found it was NOT unconstitutional for
the state to deny a woman’s admittance to the state bar on the basis of their
sex, had a famous likeminded opinion which stated…
“Man
is, or should be, woman's protector and defender. The natural and proper
timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for
many of the occupations of civil life.”
This
separate circle paternalism led to the designation of certain physical spaces
for women apart from those for men, including bathrooms in public venues. In
other words, these were safe spaces for women, tucked in a world in which women
were vulnerable.
So
what would I do to change all this? Well I would continue to fight for gender
neutral bathrooms, with the hope that one day all bathrooms will be gender
neutral. I also think we should change the conversation around this issue.
People need to know gender segregated bathrooms affect every one of us. They
uphold outdated gender norms, they suppress identities, restrict certain
individual’s access, and much more. Overall let’s keep this conversation,
movement for gender equality, and fight for change, moving forward.
Gersen,
J. S. (2016, January 25). Who’s Afraid of Gender-Neutral Bathrooms? Retrieved
from http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/whos-afraid-of-same-sex-bathrooms
Griffin, E., Ledbetter, A. M., & Sparks, G. G.
(2015). A first look at communication theory (9th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
Pharr, S. (2001). Homophobia as a Weapon of Sexism.
In Race, Class, and Gender in the United States (5th ed., pp. 143-152). New
York: Worth.
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