Queer Bathroom Graffiti Matters: Agential Realism and Affective Temporalities

Abstract

This paper weaves together Deleuze's notion of the 'virtual/actual' and Barad's 'agential realism' in order to unravel how queer bathroom graffiti affects bodies in a particular space and time. I consider the materiality of bathroom graffiti and explore how queer inscriptions, architectural structures, manufactured materials, discursive practices, and human bodies are entangled phenomena with agential capacities. Drawing on the Baradian notion of 'intra-action', I argue that queer bathroom graffiti defaces conventional space-time configurations and, in so doing, transforms how gender and sexuality is experienced in public bathrooms. Gender Politics in Public Bathrooms [1] Public bathrooms are a contested site of queer pleasure and queer pain. While restrooms are notoriously known as a space to cruise for gay sex, they are also a place of hostility where violence against trans, non-gender conforming folks, and queer sexuality occurs. Typically, North American public bathrooms are gender-segregated and designed in ways that allow the public to police and surveil gender and sexuality. Often trans people are denied entry, harassed, or assaulted while attempting to use the bathroom. As J. Jack Halberstam points out 'the bathroom problem' increases for gender ambiguous men and women, but even more so for trans people, who are often met with hostility and confrontation within this public space (28). Halberstam argues that while some genderqueers may be able to escape gender policing's watchful eye by passing as either male or female, others may have a harder time, especially if they identify outside of the gender binary (30). Therefore, genderqueers (who do not identify or comply with normative notions of either male or female) are forced to closet their gender (or non-gender) in public bathrooms and perform a subjectivity that is alien to their own. For this reason, restrooms are often avoided. As a consequence, the number of bladder-related health issues is disproportionally high within the trans and queer community (Herman 2013; West 67-68).