Abstrakt
The way both public and private spaces are gendered has been in the spotlight of gender and feminist researchers for several decades now (see for example E. Grosz’s seminal works, the Gender, Place and Culture journal or websites such as the Gender and the Built Environment Database).
One of the most obvious materialisations of how urban space is gendered are (not only) public toilets which often tend to express and maintain a rigid concept of a binary gender (most recently Gershenson, Olga, Penner, Barbara, eds. Ladies and Gents.
Public Toilets and Gender. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009), which has repercussions not only for those actively defying ‘the tyranny of gendered spaces’ (see the Gender Neutral Bathrooms initiative at http://www.genderqueercoalition.org/bathrooms).
The proposed paper will use a pool of ca. 40 picture-pairs taken at toilets of central Prague pubs in the scope of two weeks. An analysis of the photos is proposed using a combination of semiology and discourse analysis to dissect the pictures.
The aim of the analysis is to show how the link of gender and biology/anatomy is constructed or questioned in the studied spaces. Special attention will also be paid to the location of toilets for people with disabilities.