Susan Stryker-Radical Public Toilets Lecture at the CED at UC Berkeley

Susan Stryker states in an op-ed in the LA Times: "Everyone poops, as Taro Gomi's children's book by that title has long reminded us, and everyone pees, transgender and gender-nonconforming people included. That's nature. Sex-segregated public toilets, on the other hand, are unnatural social constructs— human inventions that organize our bodily functions according to cultural scripts. They are built environments that change in response to shifting mores, economic considerations and political pressures." Read the full op-ed here. In this lecture Stryker, a transgender studies scholar, discusses the recent spate of "bathroom bills" that target transgender people's access to public toilets, her work with architect Joel Sanders on gender neutral bathroom design and the broader relationship of transgender embodiment to built space. Stryker is Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies, as well as Director of the Institute for LGBT Studies; she also holds a courtesy appointment as Associate Professor in the Norton School of Family and Consumer Sciences. She is the author of many articles and several books on transgender and queer topics, most recently Transgender History (Seal Press 2008). She won a Lambda Literary Award for the anthology The Transgender Studies Reader (Routledge 2006), and an Emmy Award for the documentary film Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria (Frameline/ITVS 2005). She currently teaches classes on LGBT history, and on embodiment and technology. Research interests include transgender and queer studies, film and media, built environments, somatechnics, and critical theory. This lecture is part of a CED Diversity series entitled: Design and Difference, exploring questions of disability to generate new design methodologies, formal innovation, and spatial experience; and is part of a larger series of lectures, classes and workshops that are aimed at creating a multi-disciplinary space that seeks to engage critical thought across fields of design and study in matters of underrepresented or marginalized communities.