Library Homepage: Berea College Single Occupancy Bathroom Map: Toilet Justice

What is Toilet Justice?

Toilet justice ensures equal access to bathrooms for everyone, regardless of gender identity or expression, ability, or access needs.

Definitions:

Single-occupancy: Bathrooms with a singular toilet and lockable door.

All-gender: Anyone can use a facility, regardless of gender identity or expression.

ADA-Compliant: The types and heights of fixtures and bathroom design meet the specifications established by the Americans with Disabilities Act.

“Working for toilet justice is a vivid, material, concrete way to demand space for marginalized bodies, and to resist a respectability politics that sacrifices problematic bodies for the sake of political expediency... Toilets force us to grapple with assumptions about dignity: who has it, who deserves it, and who forfeits it.”

Julia Watts Belser. “Toilet Justice.” Toilet Justice Symposium, Political Theology Network, March 5, 2018, https://politicaltheology.com/symposium/toilet-justice/.

Toilet Justice Resources

"Why Notre Dame Needs Potty Talk." Observer Viewpoint published May 1, 2019, written by the 2019 members of Free2Pee ND.

Chess, Simone, Alison Kafer, Jessi Quizar, and Mattie Udora Richardson. "Calling All Restroom Revolutionaries." In Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Ed. That’s Revolting: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation (Soft Skull Press, 2004): 189-206.

Political Theology symposium on Toilet Justice

South Atlantic Quarterly special issue section on The Politics of the Public Toilet, edited by Kathi Weeks.

Toilet Training: Law and Order in the Bathroom (27 min, Dir. Tara Meteik, 2004)

Toilet Training companion guide for activists and educators (Sylvia Rivera Law Project, 2009)

Adair, Cassius. "Bathrooms and Beyond: Expanding a Pedagogy of Access in Trans/Disability Studies." Transgender Studies Quarterly 2, no. 3 (2015): 464-468.

Coyote, Ivan. “Why We Need Gender-Neutral Bathrooms” (TED Talk)

Plaskow, Judith. "Embodiment, Elimination, and the Role of Toilets in Struggles for Social Justice." CrossCurrents 58, no. 1 (2008): 51-64.

Sanders, Joel, and Susan Stryker. "Stalled: Gender-Neutral Public Bathrooms." South Atlantic Quarterly 115, no. 4 (2016): 779-788.

West, Isaac. "PISSAR's Critically Queer and Disabled Politics." Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7, no. 2 (2010): 156-175.