Gender Sorting Rituals at the Restroom

Image my own.

I captured this image in Hayes hall on Kenyon College's campus. The left vertical half contains a beige door in shadow, its rectangular indentations mimicking the craftsmanship of an authentically handmade sibling. A large silver plate rests on the doors right side at a height fit for opening it. Atop the plate sits a lock's key hole—its primary use happens inside the room that the door leads to. That room is a restroom, but the black and white signage that stands out in the center of the right vertical half of the image says nothing to indicate that fact. Nothing, that is, other than a symbol of a human in a dress, and, below the symbol: "WOMEN."  Two 8.5" x 11" sheets of printer paper are posted flat to the wall below the raised symbol and lettering. With statements about biological sex's complexity and difference from gender, both comment on the recent change of that signage from "Gender Neutral" to "Women."

Douglas (1966/2005) centers the body as a crucial site where purity rituals function as a microcosm of collective believes about group identity. The margins of the body, where ingress and egress occur, is a particularly important part of Douglas' theory, since how elements enter or exit the group must be policed to maintain collective ideas about in-group/out-group distinctions. The small ways that individuals approach their body are, therefore, not merely the result of individual habits or collective immaturity. Rather, by looking at the small as part of collective efforts to organize social life, it is possible to understand larger the boundaries that surround collective identification. These smaller, daily rituals serve as constant reaffirmations of those collective boundaries. 

Read in Douglas's perspective, the photo above implicates our "small" bathroom usage habits in larger collective identifications. Of particular note is the separation of restrooms by Women and Men. A Douglasian question might be: what is the connection between restroom usage and sex/gender? Others might point to collective ideas about sex/gender (that there are, at least mostly, two; that they have specific roles to fill within society; they they refer to different innate and biological ways of being human) and conclude that bathrooms separations exist to conform to these ideas (namely that women are vulnerable, especially when they are using the bathroom and therefore need protection from men). From a Douglasian perspective, however, the image above and the ritual of gendered sorting it points to is a source, not the outcome, of collective ideas about gender. By sorting ourselves to use the restroom, we manufacture the idea that men and women are distinct categories, that they should be treated differently, etc. It's tricky here, though, since these rituals are rooted in crystallized infrastructure—even someone who disavows ideas about gender would have to use a bathroom that reaffirmed collective gender ideas. Its therefore not about individual's intentions to uphold collective notions, it is rather the fact that every body must go through a sorting ritual to use the restroom that creates and upholds those notions. Indeed, the crystallization of ritual, represented in this image by the "WOMEN" sign, specifies how institutions do not simply enact collective beliefs—they must create rituals through which individuals instantiate and affirm them. Recent politics have politicized institution's choices to engage in ritual sorting. Indeed, ritual sorting is more or less required by the law in Ohio. So, despite an institution like Kenyon supporting and embracing gender-diversity (in part), its community must engage in a ritual that produces a binaristic understanding nonetheless. The postings below the signage are thus an individual's attempt to disrupt the smoothness of that ritual, calling attention to the complexity of human physiology and gender.

Douglas, Mary. 2005. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo. London ; New York: Routledge.