Bathroom Battlegrounds: How Public Restrooms Shape the Gender Order

Today's debates about transgender inclusion and public restrooms may seem unmistakably contemporary, but they have a surprisingly long and storied history in the United States--one that concerns more than mere "potty politics." Alexander K. Davis takes readers behind the scenes of two hundred years' worth of conflicts over the existence, separation, and equity of gendered public restrooms, documenting at each step how bathrooms have been entangled with bigger cultural matters: the importance of the public good, the reach of institutional inclusion, the nature of gender difference, and, above all, the myriad privileges of social status. Chronicling the debut of nineteenth-century "comfort stations," twentieth-century mandates requiring equal-but-separate men's and women's rooms, and twenty-first-century uproar over laws like North Carolina's "bathroom bill," Davis reveals how public restrooms are far from marginal or unimportant social spaces. Instead, they are--and always have been--consequential sites in which ideology, institutions, and inequality collide.

Author: Alexander K. Davis
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 01/28/2020
Pages: 320
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.90lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.90d
ISBN13: 9780520300156
ISBN10: 0520300157
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | Gender Studies
- Social Science | LGBTQ+ Studies | General
- Social Science | Discrimination

About the Author
Alexander K. Davis is Lecturer at Princeton University, where he studies gender, sexuality, and social inequality through the lens of cultural and organizational sociology.