My Winter vacation in Florida this year was most enjoyable for me and my camera. The talk of gendered bathrooms is one that comes up at least once during a Women's Studies class at UPEI. Students and Profs can sit there for hours and rant about the number of ways that our campus has gendered bathrooms, the way that these bathrooms regulate gender, and the consequences in doing so. The main problem that I find with all the bathrooms on campus is not so much that they are gendered, but that they show a little figure of either a 'male' or a 'female' on the door. This figure has multiple looks in many different settings. Sometimes one will see the traditional boxy looking figure, in Jungle Jim's they have Jane or Jim on the door, at fancier resturants they may have a lady in a big poofy hat and a man in a tuxedo, and so on. These pictures to me are not very inclusive and make me feel as if one must look like the image - look female - in order to go into the bathroom. The pictures are exclusive in that they do not include all people who may not necessarily look feminine but identify as female.
What I liked so much about this bathroom on Daytona Beach is that it did not contain a little figure, it strictly said the word women. I felt like it was inclusive to everyone who identified as woman and did not exclude by putting up a boxy little figure.
Peace,
Kerrilynn
No comments:
Post a Comment