[10] Ray Kyooyung Ra – Core Response #5 (Week 9)

Foucault is everywhere… even the bathrooms!

Susan Fraiman’s fresh take on on-screen bathrooms as women’s space dominated by the male gaze, functioning as yet another institution serving the patriarchal power, and contemporary television’s recuperative movement to take back the bathroom space that she termed “bathroom realism” was absolutely inspiring. Fraiman’s analysis of the bathroom scenes in Broad City, Insecure, and Girls stimulated much discussion among those there, especially in regards to how the on-screen bathroom has always been a Foucauldian institution that normalized white, male, heterosexuality. Expanding further on Fraiman’s examination of how the uneroticized, “realistically gross” female bodies as well as Black female bodies take on disruptive function in the Foucaldian bathroom spaces in the aforementioned three shows, I wanted to take on how queer bodies in bathroom spaces have been treated in popular television, as well as how bathroom spaces (or the absence of one) in other cultures have been portrayed in media texts as functioning points of surveillance and regulation of the female body as topic for this week’s core response post.

The above scene from Queer as Folk is not the bathroom sex scene that I intended to show (I could not find the one I needed uploaded online), but it demonstrates how public restrooms are presented in popular culture as a focal point of gay sexuality. The specific scene from QAF that I delved into was from the fifth episode of the first season: when Justin’s mother finds out that Justin is gay, and she decides to talk to Justin about his closeted sexuality in a museum setting. However, once there, Justin decides to have spontaneous sex with a stranger in the museum bathroom, leaving his mother sitting alone in front of an enormous modernist painting, a trail of tears rolling down her face as she waits for her son to come out of the stall. Even before George Michael was found and publicly outed as gay by an undercover cop who arrested him for engaging in “lewd” public sexual act, the public restroom space served a particular role in surveilling the gays. Denied private space to perform their sexuality, gay men were relegated to the ‘safest’ place they could perform coitus, which was the public restroom – but this ‘haven’ for sexual liberation never could serve that role, positioned on a narrow precipice between the private and the public domain. Though erotically charged, the public bathroom becomes yet another ‘locker room’ for gay men, where homophobic violence and surveillance can be readily executed to the sexually deviant by the heterosexual man sharing that space. In the particular scene from QAF S1E5, the bathroom space is presented as such secret-but-not-so-secret space for sexual deviance of the gay man, but at the same time, it is juxtaposed to the close-up pan of Justin’s mother clearly in distress, serving as a reminder of how the sexually deviant gay man’s liberation double-edges as a wedge into the ‘ideal’, heteronormative family unit.

Another example I thought of was an Indian film released in 2017 titled Toilet: Ek Prem Katha, or Toilet: A Love Story whose story, as the title implies, revolves around a toilet that is denied to a young bride married to a man, who finds out once she moves in with his family. While Fraiman’s lecture focused on the contested ownership of the restroom space, it is clear with Toilet: Ek Prem Katha that a toilet itself can be a luxury for women beyond the American context. Mentioned by Fraiman as background to her research, the lack of a toilet for Indian women in the home as it is considered ‘unclean’ mirrors the pre-mid-1800s’ trend of installing exclusive bathroom spaces reserved solely for men, denying women access to similar facilities. NPR observes in its article A Toilet Is The Star Of India's Hit Rom-Com how the film reflects the politics surrounding the toilet for women in Indian society, how the male-centric structuring of infrastructures and lack of space for “bathroom realism” in the cultural space denies women even the space to relieve themselves, also exposing women at higher risks of sexual violence and natural hazards during open defecation. Though more on the nose than the scenes Susan Fraiman discussed in her lecture, it is easy to observe how institutionalized and politically charged a space even like the restroom is, and how those deviant from the patriarchal norm must constantly fight for, on screen and off screen, their place on the toilet.