Men's Room

from Intumus: Interior Design Reader Edited by Mark Taylor and Juleanna Preston 2006 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Lee Edelman

Lee Edelman's text examines the public men's room as an environment that is constructed (made/given rise to) by men's behaviour in the space, and at the same time cultural/social actions are conditioned by the space itself. He suggests that such spaces are far from a neutral, technological response to bodily necessities, but are designed by, and have designs on men. An analysis of one men's room where televisions have been installed above the urinal in an effort to make men feel 'at home', serves to reveal how architecture is being used to condition space when male sexuality is challenged by cultural norms of sexually specific behaviour. This post-structural reading conditioned by queer theory, suggests that for the men's room, architecture, masculinity and sexuality are interlinked.

The public men's room, architecturally speaking, is rarely a room with a view – or rarely, at least, a room that affords a view outside itself. Like the closet, to which it is near allied (both as 'water closet' and as site of bodily relations discursively tabooed), the men's room tends to lack windows. And on those occasions when windows do figure as part of its structural design, the glass, more often translucent than transparent, generally precludes any visual commerce between the areas without and within. Substituting mirrors for windows, satisfying the eye's desire for depth of field by returning its look to itself, the men's room, through a segmentation of space that can justly be called self-reflexive, gestures, despite the accessibility of that space to a subset of the 'public,' towards an idea of interiority, towards a principle of containment, implicit in the architectural imperative that shapes the subject – forming and informing him as the subject of ideology – in its own monumentalizing image, modeling the subject as container of space through the articulation of structural, because structuring, identities.

Closed in on itself as if to exemplify the very notion of constructed space, but always, of course, designed to permit exchanges between inside and outside analogous to those that would seem most successfully arrested by its circumscription of the visual, this locus of functional attention to culturally abjected bodily functions always necessarily functions in excess of a logic of mere functionality. The men's room, that is, though clearly conceived as a technological response to the hygienic concerns associated with bodily

103

political • 1996

late 20th century space

necessities, constitutes a social technology in itself to necessitate a certain relation between the male subject and his body. The design of the men's room, simply put, has palpable designs on men; it aspires, that is, to design them. As a site of representation, as a space intended to 'serve' the subject it collaborates to call into being, the men's room gives the male subject his body in its relation to symbolic space – effectively locating him within his body as he is located within space itself – by allowing him, before the only public, the male one, whose witness can matter, to enact, as if in a theater, the law of its mandatory closeting. I refer, with this, not only to the law of (heterosexual) masculinity as we know it – the law that reads the male body, in its potential to be seized, overwhelmed, by erotic stimuli not provoked by the 'proper' object (a woman) or centered in the 'proper' place (the genitals), as requiring consignment to a psychic space analogous to a closet – but also to the law whereby the straight male body becomes a closet itself: a spatial enclosure for an autonomous subject able to imagine inhabiting his body only by conceiving his body simultaneously as container and thing contained; as being and needing a closet; as bestowing upon him the social protection, the cultural shelter, it uniquely affords within our patriarchal sex-gender system, but only so long as he performatively shelters the structural flaw that opens his body, by way of its multiple openings (ocular, oral, anal, genital), to the various psychic vicissitudes able to generate illicit desires. As a prime arena for that performance, for that enactment of the body's compliance with the cultural regulation of desire, the men's room marks a critical stage both for and in the solicitation of masculine subjectivity.

But just as soliciting the subject can define the social project of the men's room, so it also names the threat against which the solicited subject must be sheltered. However much the men's room may prompt the performers within it to heed its own subjectifying call – the call it slyly assimilates to the irresistible call of nature itself – it allows for the possibility of error, for what the penal code calls soliciting for the purpose of committing unnatural acts. And the habitual structuring of the men's room to ensure the possibility of this error makes clear that whatever shelter it provides requires the presence of the threat its very design apparently solicits.

The men's room, set apart as it is to provide a culturally designated 'privacy' in which to respond to the body's demands, houses two highly differentiated spaces that re-establish within it the consequential distinction between public and private zones, mapping each of those attributes onto specified zones of the male subject's body. Thus, the genitals, though figured as the 'private parts,' acquire, through the openness of the urinal, a relatively 'public' status here, while the anus and its functional necessity bear weightier burdens of social embarrassment.¹ In the men's room the norms of male bodily display reverse the values that the laws of pudeur assign to the privatized portions of male anatomy in the world outside: you don't show your ass in the men's room, and you don't conceal your dick. The partition that distinguishes the privacy of the stalls from the

104

exposure of the urinals and sinks, therefore, defines the men's room, like the U.S. Congress, as strategically bicameral, allowing each part of its legislative body to hold the other in check. As camera lucida and camera obscura at once, the men's room might simply come out and proclaim as its motto 'I am a camera' were it not that it operates more saliently as a factory for turning into cameras themselves all those who enter to confront, as if in camera, the unblinking eye of the law that keeps watch, through every patron's eye – including, signally, their own – to see that what is publicly displayed is never directly observed.

The law of the men's room decrees that men's dicks be available for public contemplation must never take place. The performative bravado, 'naturalized' only by virtue of cultural insistence, implicit in taking one's dick in one's hand in the presence of other men similarly engaged, depends upon one of two governing assumptions: either that such a display can occur because the space that permits it is consecrated, more or less explicitly, to the purposes of gay male sex, or that the display itself contemptuously – or apotropaically – declares its refusal to allow that such a space could possibly be one where gay men, or gay male desire, might appear. Oscillating between these two assumptions, the logic of the men's room compels the normative enactment of a vigilant nonchalance that responds to the disciplinary pressure that the men's room exerts upon visual relations. Though the open display of the glans at the urinal disavows its capacity to occasion desire, the vector of the gaze, however oblique, remains alert to observe the glance that exposes any interest at all in the glans thus exposed. Where better to discern the full force of aggression implicit in the question – 'Are you looking at me?' – that condenses our pervasive male cultural anxiety about the capacities of gay men to transform, or to queer, the consistency of the reality produced and assured by the gaze of the symbolic? And if, in response to that question as posed by a man at a urinal taking a leak, another patron, so occupied or not, should answer, unapologetically, 'yes,' or if he should urge his irate companion to seek out the cloistered protection of a stall if he so dislikes being looked at that way, then how could the first man respond to this blatant defiance of the law so cunningly built into the architectural disposition of this space but with what he must view as an equivalent violence, whether it be verbal – as in, for instance, the clarion-cry, 'Faggot!,' with which certain straight men imagine they display a triumphant acuity in unveiling what was staring them in the face all along – or physical – as in the numerous blows with which, in response to this discovery, they try to consign to oblivion all those of whose type they resent their inability to be, for so much as a moment, oblivious themselves.

At the urinal, then, the ritualistic indifference that must seem to accompany, and must seem to greet, each act of genital display aspires to conceal the constant scrutiny bestowed by every sidelong glance on every sidelong glance. Whereas women may retreat to the powder room alone or even, to the comically theatricalized befuddlement of heterosexual

105

men, in pairs – to attend, as its very name suggests, to the question of how they look, men, upon entering the men’s room, focus instead on how they are looking, or, more precisely, on how their looking may be looked upon in turn. If the men’s room offers no windows through which the eye can escape its locale, and if it prohibits the eye from alighting on what the design of the urinal insists nonetheless on publicly drawing out, then its space might properly be interpreted as the very site of the symbolic gaze, as a space that monitors the circuitry of visual relations propping up a ‘reality’ in which each look of the subject is filtered through the gaze of a symbolic order that, in every sense of the word, solicits him. Consider, after all, that however much the men who stand shoulder to shoulder at the urinal may study the eyes of their neighbors through the corners of their own, the frontal force of their attention will fall, most often, upon their own member and the arc of what it voids. And what, in such a case, can the eye be looking for, or at, if not a look, if not a way of looking, that either will confirm the symbolic gaze that solicits the subject as heterosexual through the phallicization – which necessitates the ocularization – of the penis, or else will threaten, shake, solicit the coherence of the heterosexual subject through the recognition of another desire, another solicitation, superimposed upon the images that parade as solid social reality like distorting ghosts rudely conjured by interference in video reception when the signals from two adjoining channels are both displayed at once. His penis, that is, must be seen by the straight male subject as what sees him and hence, like the antenna of a television set, as what enables him to see: as the visible gaze of the symbolic, the part of his body least his own, that takes his measure and grants him a privileged place in the structure of social meaning as it justifies his place within the room set aside for men. But should its sublation into the phallic eye be put on the blink by the glance of a man who, seeming to meet what should be its gaze, seemingly gazes back only at meat, such justifications may vanish and, with them, the subject’s own solidity, his place in the social architecture, as he and the images shaping his world themselves fade into ghostliness, unexpectedly picking up frequencies they had been programmed not to receive so as to keep their focus singularly fixed on the channel that common wisdom receives as the site of public access.

The following, written by Monique P. Yazigi, appeared under the title, ‘What Do Men Want? Perhaps, Says a Restaurant, Private TV?,’ in the ‘City’ section of the New York Times on 23 October 1994:

The American Renaissance Restaurant, at 260 West Broadway, has inset two 13-inch Mitsubishi television sets above the two black porcelain urinals in the men’s bathroom. “You would have to be a man to understand why we did it,” said John Aron, the manager of the restaurant, giggling. “Men usually have nothing to look at and they certainly don’t want their eyes to wander.”

106

Tellingly, the entrance to the men's room here first passes, at least allusively, through Freud's interrogation of female desire – as famously expressed in his much cited query, 'Was will das Weib?': 'What does woman want?' – as if to confirm a complementarity, like that of paired lavatory doors, that disavows any serious doubt about what men really want. Though the surety of that knowledge lets the title relax into the cultural stereotype, comically deployed, of the successfully domesticated heterosexual man whose desire has been channeled by – and toward – the channels on his TV, that humor can barely distract from the static introduced by conceiving the men's room as a place in which men's desires, susceptible to rechanneling as they thus appear to be, might plausibly find satisfaction. Indeed, when the restaurant's owner, accounting for the televisions in terms at a variance – strategically unremarked – from those of the manager cited above, explains that, 'We want people to feel like they're at home,' one might reasonably reflect on Freud's well-known analysis of the homelike and the unfamiliar, the heimlich and the unheimlich, which disconcertingly come together as the double-edged shadow of the uncanny cuts its way across the can to cancel any and every assurance about where men may feel at home.

For Freud, of course, the uncanny names the experience of derealization provoked by some threat to the ego's integrity that recalls the time before the ego had fully detached itself from the world. Bound up, therefore, with a sense of doubleness as the subject, in a vertiginous rupture of the ground on which he stands, senses himself unexpectedly observed and all at once starts to view himself through the eyes of another person or thing that seems, improperly and unnaturally, to usurp his subjectivity, the uncanny always manifests itself in a troubling, which can take specific form as a doubling, of the gaze. The subject, in its grip, will always feel that he is losing his, finding himself no longer at home in the world he thought he knew; for this alarming disappearance of the sense of 'at home-ness,' which occurs, however paradoxically, with a certain sickening familiarity, signals a toppling of the walls within which the subject has been constructed and through which he has realized the imaginary architecture of a self. The uncanny, then, might be understood as a distinctive type of 'home-sickness' that, like dwellings inadequately vented to allow air to circulate in and out, produces a sickness of and in the home that occasions a nostalgic longing for the sense of safety that 'home' once assured.

Only in such a context should one interpret the claim that TVs in the men's room help patrons to 'feel like they're at home.' Some men, to be sure, determined to catch every moment of excitement as they watch The Big Game, may leave the door to the bathroom ajar – or open – when they make their needful retreat to use the facilities at home, but very few would count among the tell-tale signs of 'homeliness' the luxury of having a television set available in the john. Although the 'meaning' of the television may be colored by its connection to the life men live in the living room, its association with the heimlich turns unheimlich in the bathroom, which is never to be conceptualized as a room wherein life could be lived. After all, as anyone who has ever placed or read a real-estate

107

advertisement knows, bathrooms are not even numbered as rooms when describing the size of a home. Rather than make the space of the men's room as comfortable as one's own home, therefore, placing televisions above the urinals reflects an awareness that it only heightens in attempting to occlude: that the men's room is an uncanny space where the gaze of the symbolic order sees male bodies into social meaning, thereby establishing the men's room as a nodal point, ground zero, in the cultural compaction of masculinity into a logic of visual relations.

The manager of the restaurant comes closer to this truth in his mini-meditation on the customary misfortunes of the men's room and men's eyes. Just as the owner can only address the uncanniness that structures the men's room, however, through his representation of the television sets as making the space more like 'home,' so the manager can only identify the double vision the men's room induces by contradictorily insisting, on the one hand, that it offers those using it 'nothing to look at' while recognizing, on the other hand, a temptation within it fully capable of enticing their eyes 'to wander.' But this contradiction resolves into clarity once the visible dicks at the urinal, toward which their eyes might incautiously turn, are understood to carry, as if by legislative decree, a sort of Surgeon General's warning that labels them precisely as 'nothing to look at,' thus granting them all the power, and danger, of Yahweh rising up before Moses from out of another sort of bush. And just as the prohibition against glimpsing Yahweh's face coincided with a prohibition against speaking his name, so here, for the manager and owner both – as, indeed, for the culture they inhabit – the law that prohibits the gaze of a man from resting on his neighbor's dick suffers under prohibition itself as something that every man must know but none must ever pronounce, 'you'd have to be a man to understand,' as the manager rightly puts it, alluding to the homophobic commandment of the men's room that solicits the subject into manhood as unmistakably as the voice of Yahweh called Moses to his destiny before the Law. (… p 157)

Note

1 These sentences condense an argument I have made at greater length in 'Tearooms and Sympathy; Or, The Epistemology of the Water Closet,' in my Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory, Routledge (New York and London), 1994, pp 148–170. Since I will focus in this essay primarily on the significations informing the logic of the urinal, I cite here, by way of contextualization, a passage from 'Tearooms and Sympathy' that may help to trace the lineaments of my argument concerning the space of the stall:

'I want to suggest that the men's room … is the site of a particular heterosexual anxiety about the potential inscriptions of homosexual desire and about the possibility of knowing or recognizing whatever might constitute "homosexual difference".

'This can be intuited more readily when the restroom is considered not, as it is by Lacan, in terms of "urinary segregation" – a context that establishes the phallus from the outset as the token of anatomical difference – but as the site of a loosening of sphincter control, evoking, therefore, an older eroticism, undifferentiated by gender, because anterior to the genital tyranny that raises the phallus to its privileged position. Precisely because the phallus marks the putative stability of the divide between "Ladies" and "Gentlemen", because it articulates the concept of sexual difference in terms of "visible

108

perception", the "urinary" function in the institutional men's room customarily takes place within view of others – as if to indicate its status as an act of definitional display; but the private enclosure of the toilet stall signals the potential anxiety at issue in the West when the men's room becomes the locus not of urinary but of intestinal relief. For the satisfaction that such relief affords abuts dangerously on homophobically abjectified desires, and because that satisfaction marks an opening onto difference that would challenge the phallic supremacy and coherence of the signifier on the men's room door, it must be isolated and kept in view at once lest its erotic potential come out' (pp 160–1).

Lee Edelman, 'Men's Room', Joel Sanders (ed), Stud: Architectures of Masculinity, Princeton Architectural Press (New York), 1996.

(Excerpt pp 152–7)

109