After watching an excerpt of Professor Sheila Cavanagh’s film, The Queer Bathroom Monologues, I never thought about the toilet or bathroom the same way again. It was no longer just a hush-hush space to dispose of bodily waste.
The film stimulated an important class discussion among the students in Critical Sexualities at York and motivated me to think about our relationship with the bathroom.
I had never imagined that the bathroom, a space that we usually associate with personal hygiene, has fostered experiences of discrimination and aggression as a result of homophobia and transphobia.
Cavanagh delves into the seldom-discussed topic of gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex peoples’ bathroom experiences to highlight the developing issues produced by bathrooms being gender-segregated spaces.
Re-emphasizing the topics in her works of Queer Bathroom Monologues and Queering Bathrooms: Gender, Sexuality, and the Hygienic Imagination, Cavanagh brings forth Queer Bathroom Stories, a new play being performed at the Buddies in Bad Times Theatre from May 31 to June 15.
Queer Bathroom Stories is a theatrical representation of in-person interviews and real life experiences depicting the multifaceted stories and experiences of gender and sexual identities, and their intersection with public washrooms.
Excalibur recently interviewed Sheila Cavanagh to find out a bit more about her play:
 
Excalibur: For those who are unfamiliar with the topic of gender-segregated washrooms and their impact, on queer people especially, how would you describe Queer Bathroom Stories? 
 
Sheila Cavanagh: If you are transgender or gender-variant you lack cisgender (non-trans) privilege. In other words, if your gender identity is at odds with the sign on the bathroom door, you are more likely to experience harassment and gender-based discrimination.
For those who are masculine women or feminine men, it is not always comfortable or easy to access a gendered toilet. This becomes a problem at work, at school, and in society at large.
The bladder functions like a leash. If one can’t use a bathroom without others calling security or inquiring about their right to be in the room, your rights are compromised.
 
E: What inspired you to adapt your book, Queer Bathrooms: Gender, Sexuality and Hygienic Imagination, into a play? What are some of the new additions that the audience can expect?
 
SC: Queer Bathroom Stories is a play based on 100 interviews with LGBTQ folks in Canadian and American cities about their experiences in bathrooms.
The interviews were originally conducted for my book, but the most interesting stories were edited out of the book.
Academic publishing lends itself to quotable sound-bites as opposed to unwieldy stories.
I was left with a two-foot high pile of transcripts, full of amazing stories, and I couldn’t let them go untold. The world premiere of Queer Bathroom Stories is based on these stories.
Audiences can expect to hear a range of stories about gender and sex in the can.
Specifically, they will see three talented actors enact all that is aggressive, desirous, disgusting, comic, and intriguing ideas about toilets.
Hallie Burt, Chy Ryan Spain, and Tyson James perform the myriad of ways we navigate, use, redefine, avoid, and are confronted by homophobia and transphobia in the rooms.
Audiences will meet 72 characters as they perform the complexities of gender identity, desire, and hate in the loo.
The stories span from the devastating to the sublime, the traumatic to the passionate, the mundane to the curious, the comic and everything in between.
Audiences will leave knowing there is something inherently erotic and traumatic about bathrooms, something endemic to queer-life worlds.
 
E: What do you hope the audience will take away from the content of the play? 
SC: I hope audiences will be moved to question and challenge their own preconceived ideas about gender, sex, desire, and bodies.
Many trans and gender variant interviewees experienced job-related discrimination when trying to use a washroom at work.
Others chose not to use bathrooms at all because the questions, glares and verbal harassment they received from non-trans patrons took an emotional toll.
I would like audiences to think about why we genderize bathrooms. In most Western, advanced, industrial societies, bathrooms are the last officially gendered space.
It behooves us to question the logic and rationale for gendered bathrooms.
For example, there is no evidence to suggest that gendered toilets decrease violence against women. Quite the contrary!
Enclosed, segregated spaces with one door provide opportunities for entrapment. Fewer instances of violence occur in gender inclusive, open-concept designs.
Gendered toilets are more dangerous for those who are trans- or gender variant because the signs on the bathroom door gives people license to interrogate others.
Finally, I would like audiences to think creatively about how we can redefine bathrooms to include, validate, and celebrate multiple gender identities and sexual orientations.
 
E: As a playwright and as an author, which method of representation, in your opinion, is more effective in raising awareness about the issues of queer/trans people experience in gender-specific washrooms?
 
SC: Both academic and theatrical forums are important, but each genre reaches a different (albeit overlapping) audience. I don’t value one above the other.
It is important to make academic, theoretically, and methodologically compelling arguments for gender and sexual inclusivity in society.
It is equally important to disseminate one’s research in arts-based and theatrical forums to engage dialogue with, and involve, LGBTQ community members.
I am excited by verbatim theatre [research-based theatre, often using interview transcripts] because it animates the boundary between academia and art.
Part of what it means to be queer is to negotiate social boundaries, liminal spaces coded as abject, like bathrooms.
And arts-based research enables us to more fully explore queer life worlds.
For me, it made sense to think about Queer Bathroom Monologues as an antithesis to the book.
The culture and symbolism of the toilet is, like art, impossible to quantify and so it provides an interesting counter or, rather, compliment to the more tangible, geo-social space of the toilet as focused upon in the book.
 
E: How does a bathroom generate a hierarchial relationship between queer and heterosexual people using the same space?
 
SC: Bathrooms have always sorted people by gender, class, race, and disability in North American cities.
We need only remember the racially segregated toilets and water fountains of the American South or the class divisions in Victorian homes [in Toronto] in which servants were given a segregated toilet, often in the basement.
Even today, custodians are [occasionally] unable to use the very toilets they clean, people with physical disabilities are often given their own rooms, which aren’t always accessible, and flush toilets are being built in the non-Western countries to cater to North American and European tourists.
 
E: How do experiences of trans and queer people influence the way they view and understand their individual self, and the self in relation to others?
 
SC: For those who have difficulty accessing toilets without experiencing homophobic or transphobic discrimination, the gendering of bathrooms takes an emotional toll.
But it also takes a physical toll. When one must limit their consumption of liquid, it impacts upon one’s health. Postponing urination for long periods of time also compromises kidney functioning.
This is a serious health issue. It is also a human rights issue.
 
E: Would you say the depiction of experiences in Queer Bathroom Stories can be perceived or understood as performances of resistance? 
 
SC: I see Queer Bathroom Stories as political theatre.
The stage is, in many ways, an ideal forum to perform gender variance and same-sex desire.
It touches people on an emotional, visceral level and compels us to identify with life stories, identities and experiences unlike our own.
Gays, lesbians, transvestites, drag kings, drag queens, and genderqueers have made good use of the stage to make visible what Judith Butler calls “gender performativity” and to unsettle, subvert, and rework the matrixes of heterosexuality, race, and class.

See This Play

• Buddies in Bad Times Theatre
• 12 Alexander Street, Toronto
• Run times: May 31 – June 15
• May 31 and June 1: $15
• June 3 – 15: $20

 
Sreya Banerjea
Contributor
 
Image source: Wikimedia Commons