The Men's Room

Definition

The men's room is the sex-segregated public washroom as theorized by Lee Edelman: not "a technological response to the hygienic concerns associated with bodily necessities" but "a social technology in itself to necessitate a certain relation between the male subject and his body" — a room whose design "has palpable designs on men; it aspires, that is, to design them" (pp. 103–104). Architecturally, the type is defined by an anti-view: 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 mirrors substitute for glazing, "satisfying the eye's desire for depth of field by returning its look to itself" — a "self-reflexive" enclosure that gestures "towards an idea of interiority, towards a principle of containment" (p. 103). Its plan is "strategically bicameral" — the exposed urinals and sinks against the enclosed stalls — "allowing each part of its legislative body to hold the other in check," and thereby re-establishing "within it the consequential distinction between public and private zones, mapping each of those attributes onto specified zones of the male subject's body": "you don't show your ass in the men's room, and you don't conceal your dick" (pp. 104–105). The room's law — "so cunningly built into the architectural disposition of this space" — makes each user the enforcer: the room is "a factory for turning into cameras themselves all those who enter," the law keeping watch "through every patron's eye – including, signally, their own – to see that what is publicly displayed is never directly observed" (p. 105).

The concept matters for interior theory as the limit case of the public interior's gendering: the men's room is "the very site of the symbolic gaze, as a space that monitors the circuitry of visual relations propping up a 'reality'" (p. 106), "a nodal point, ground zero, in the cultural compaction of masculinity into a logic of visual relations" (p. 108). It is also the room-type that cannot be a living room — "never to be conceptualized as a room wherein life could be lived"; "bathrooms are not even numbered as rooms when describing the size of a home" (pp. 107–108) — which is precisely why its 1994 re-domestication (televisions above the urinals so men could "feel like they're at home") registers as uncanny rather than comfortable.

Key Thinkers

• Lee Edelman — the room-type's theorist: the men's room as social technology, solicitor of heterosexual masculinity and structure of its own queering ("Men's Room," 1996/2006).
• (Referenced, not paged — see log: Jacques Lacan, whose "urinary segregation" — the phallus "as the token of anatomical difference" — Edelman counters with the stall's pre-phallic "older eroticism"; Joel Sanders, editor of Stud: Architectures of Masculinity (1996), the original venue.)
• Sigmund Freud — the heimlich/unheimlich machinery through which the room's re-domestication is read; "Was will das Weib?" as the title's allusive frame (p. 107).

Related Concepts

• The Closet — the room's "near allied": water closet and discursively tabooed site; the straight male body as "a closet itself," "container and thing contained."
• The Gaze — the men's room as "the very site of the symbolic gaze"; the penis as "the visible gaze of the symbolic, the part of his body least his own."
• Privacy — the room's "culturally designated 'privacy'" split bicamerally between stall and urinal; the public/private distinction mapped onto body-zones and reversed at the urinal.
• Masculinity — the subject the room solicits: "the law of (heterosexual) masculinity as we know it," enforced by "vigilant nonchalance."
• Homosocial Space — the room's exclusivity: "the only public, the male one, whose witness can matter."
• Voyeurism — the inverted apparatus: not one spy at a peephole but every patron "turned into cameras themselves"; the sidelong glance that polices the display it refuses to see.
• The Uncanny — the room's affective register: the heimlich TV "turns unheimlich in the bathroom"; the uncanny as "home-sickness," a toppling of "the imaginary architecture of a self."
• Gendered Space — the room as the everyday apparatus of sex-segregation; gendered space built for and by men.
• Separate Spheres — the room's internal re-staging of the public/private division; the powder room as its feminine counterpart ("how they look" vs. "how their looking may be looked upon in turn").
• Boundaries — the boundary-regime of windows, translucent glass, mirrors and partitions: "Closed in on itself as if to exemplify the very notion of constructed space, but always… designed to permit exchanges between inside and outside."
• The Mirror — the room's window-substitute: "Substituting mirrors for windows… returning its look to itself" (p. 103) — the containment regime of the mirror, whose psychoanalytic origin-case is the mirror hung on the window in Freud's own study (Fuss & Sanders).
• The Dining Room — the Victorian house's other "men's room" (Eastlake's after-dinner terminal point of "the ladies ascend"): the domestic-scale counterpart of the public room-type.
• Panopticon — the room's dispersed surveillance: the panopticon's eye split among all occupants, each "including, signally, their own."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Men's Room (Edelman 1996/2006) — the defining source: the windowless/mirror-filled "principle of containment" (p. 103); the "social technology" that designs its users (pp. 103–104); the bicameral plan and the reversed pudeur values (pp. 104–105); the "factory for turning into cameras" (p. 105); "the very site of the symbolic gaze" (p. 106); the urinal-televisions and the uncanny (pp. 106–108); note 1's stall/urinal distinction from "Tearooms and Sympathy" (pp. 108–109).

Open Questions

• Edelman analyzes one room-type at one moment (1990s New York); do gender-neutral and all-gender washrooms dissolve his apparatus, or redistribute it (the "vigilant nonchalance" now unbounded by sex)?
• The note's counter-Lacanian stall — "an older eroticism, undifferentiated by gender, because anterior to the genital tyranny" — suggests the room-type contains the seeds of its own queering: is that a design program (partitioning, sightlines, urinal geometry) or only a reading practice?
• The urinal-television re-domesticated the public washroom avant la lettre; what does the smartphone in the stall do to the "logic of visual relations" — does the private screen finally give the men's room a "view"?
• Eastlake's dining room is the Victorian "men's room" of the house; is the public men's room the same apparatus (male display, female exclusion, furniture-coded gender) at civic scale — and does the wiki need a general theory of gendered room-types to hold both?

Stub note: This page was created from a single source (Edelman 1996/2006) and requires fuller treatment — additional room-type histories (public conveniences, railway lavatories, the "Restroom" pavilion literature) and design-side sources.