Toilets, Gender, and disability

What is the importance of toilets in culture?

• the relationships between toilets, gender and dis/ability
• toilets as a social and cultural space that shapes the quality of children’s experiences of schooling
• school toilet literature often fails to acknowledge socio-cultural histories of toilets (school or otherwise), and, relating to this, the intertwined relationships between toilets, embodiment and identity (gender, disability, sexuality, race, faith and so on)
• the majority of school toilet literature perpetuates the dominant structures of ‘normalcy’ that teach us about the ‘right’, ‘ideal’ and ‘normal’ way of being child/adult/human 
• ‘once we start to segregate them to change for PE, they learn that male and female bodies, when unclothed, are to be kept separate’ . Binary gendered toilets teach a similar lesson: that there are two genders that are polar opposites to one another and must be kept separate when unclothed.
• ‘civilising’ processes of fear, shame and embarrassment that children (to different extents) learn to feel about their bodies (Blumenthal 2014) in space and place. Rather than frame the fear of being heard or smelt in the school toilet as a fear of bullying, our argument is that it would be more productive to think about embodied cultural anxieties of the toilet and the ways in which lessons in shame and privacy (Blumenthal 2014) vary dependent upon socio-spatial positioning.
• LESSONS CHILDREN LEARN THROUGH TOILETS
• come to understand urination and defecation as private affairs.
• taught individuals to feel bodily shame and revulsionmasters of their bodies, learning strict control and management in accordance with social propriety or otherwise risk personal degradation and social embarrassment. This is exemplified in the toilet training process Western parents put their children through today with children having in the space of just a few years to attain the advanced level of shame and revulsion that has developed over many centuries.
• Gender is one axis along which ‘civilising’ lessons of shame and privacy are learnt. 
• An obvious gendered example of the different degrees to which we learn shame and privacy is the common placement of a shared urinal in the ‘men’s’ toilet, whilst the ‘women’s’ is made up of single stall cubicles, or that it is more socially acceptable for men to urinate in public than it is for women.
• discourses of femininity expect neatness, prettiness and silence, discourses of masculinity teach boys to be messy, noisy and take up space
• ‘Definitely [men] don’t look at each other’s penises’  For these participants this came down to a fear of homosexuality.
•  it is not just ‘the body’ that threatens the school (Paechter 2004), but particularly bodies that transgress boundaries: ‘uncivilised’ leaky bodies that do not toilet in the ways that we want them to; trans or intersex bodies that do not ‘fit’, or have moved between binary gendered categories (presumed to be stable); and sexualised, particularly queer sexual bodies (or bodies perceived to be queer) that look at other penises.
• disabled toilets...the lack of gendering on the accessible facility was not a negative, rather it was understood, as a ‘queer space’ where gendered norms were not enforced. 
• autonomy to choose which toilet space to use is constrained through practices of toilet policing

Women's Rooms and Feminist Progress?

• Nineteenth-century women had to limit their excursions outside the home to how long they could hold it because there were no “women’s rooms.

• Even as women entered the workplace, often in the new factories that were being built at the time, there was a reluctance to integrate them fully into public life,” it reads. But it became a necessity. Those spaces — from reading rooms to train cars to privies — were designed to “mimic the comforts of home.
• the development of the designated women’s bathroom was critical to allowing women the freedom to work and move about freely, as long as they wanted, outside the home
• The restroom as social and emotional space
• where women get real with each other and with themselves. 
• where they gather to regroup when social situations get awkward or intense or they need to communicate in private. 
• where chit-chat warms women up to each other in a world where it’s easy to turn a cold shoulder or entertain suspicion or false ideas of what other women are like.
• get a tampon
• social cohesion
• where women go to take deep, slow breaths to overcome their anxiety before an interview or presentation. 
• It’s where teenagers vent to each other. 
• It’s where broken hearts spill out in hot tears onto wet counters, and blessed strangers come alongside to offer comfort
• men network in bathrooms

Men's Bodies and War: the production of a variety of gendered soldier bodies and the various roles they play in war

• the body central in understanding how modern militaries work, but that the production of particular notions of masculinity and femininity is central in understanding what kinds of bodies are produced.
• For Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish, the modern military served as a central example of how the body is malleable and ‘pliable’, and how military discipline creates an ‘automatism of habit’ 
• The first Gulf War, with its excessive focus on technology, communications and ‘surgical strikes’ seemed to seek to remove the human body from war altogether, something that was merely exacerbated by the US military not publishing body counts
• bodies are subject to power relations that invest in them, mark them and bring them into being as they are ‘directly involved in the political field’ 
• the types of wars fought in recent years by Western forces arguably require very particular bodies and a range of femininities and masculinities, 
• Female Engagement Teams (FETs) in Afghanistan-women’s bodies are deemed particularly useful for the practice of ‘population-centric’ counterinsurgency in that they are expected to have a unique access to local Afghan women’s lives and experiences 
• made up solely of female soldier bodies with the purpose to access other female bodies (Afghan women) for information and as a part of the effort to ‘win hearts and minds’ speaks to the centrality of bodies in 21st century counterinsurgency. 
• militaries have for a long time nurtured particular aesthetics such as being clean-shaven (or have an appropriately trimmed beard), having properly pressed or ironed shirts and shoes polished to a high standard; all of which become symbolic of an individual’s soldier’s degree of dedication and discipline, both to his or hers individual militarized body, and as a part of a collective militarized body
• by cracking down on tattoos  the US Army with this new and tightened up policy clearly places a great deal of effort on ‘looking the part’ and regulating the aesthetics of ‘the soldier body’. 
• women’s entry into the armed forces posed a whole range of new challenges for the military and whether or not female soldiers should wear high heels and have breast pockets on their shirts were deemed important questions
• regulations that ensure that the femininity and masculinity of women’s and men’s bodies are governed in particular ways. 
• male soldiers are now not allowed to have long hair, wear cosmetics or nail polish. 
• This is interesting not only because women are allowed to (and that this in and of itself tells us something about regulations of male and female bodies), but also because how this is regulated for women speaks to a particular kind of female soldier produced. 
• Any use of nail polish or cosmetics worn by females must be ‘conservative’ and not only ‘complement the uniform’, but also ‘their complexion’
• Prohibited nail polish colours include (but are not limited to) purple, gold, black, blue, white, bright red, khaki, camouflage or fluorescent colours  
• If women in the US Army chose to wear make up, the sanctioned options ultimately need to be aesthetically pleasing to their superior officers.
• Females cannot, unlike men, have shaved hair. Also, any use of what the US Army calls ‘hair holding devices’ is heavily regulated and they must not be used for ‘decorative purposes’ 
• encourage a particular production of femininity deemed suitable for a martial environment – suitably feminine, but nothing that can be deemed ‘girly’.