Men's Room

Author: Lee Edelman Year: 2006 (Intimus reprint; original 1996) Source type: chapter

Raw file: raw/chapters/edelman-2006-mens-room.md

Summary

Lee Edelman's "Men's Room" — first published in Joel Sanders's Stud: Architectures of Masculinity (Princeton Architectural Press, 1996, pp. 152–157; the Intimus excerpt is pp. 103–109 of Taylor & Preston's 2006 anthology) — reads the public men's room as a space that is not "a neutral, technological response to bodily necessities" but "a social technology in itself," one whose design "has palpable designs on men; it aspires, that is, to design them." Working through queer theory and psychoanalysis (Freud's uncanny, Lacan's symbolic), Edelman argues that the men's room is the built apparatus through which heterosexual masculinity is solicited, displayed and policed: a windowless, mirror-filled "principle of containment" whose bicameral plan (exposed urinals, enclosed stalls) maps public and private onto zones of the male body, whose law is enforced by every patron's own sidelong glance, and whose structure perpetually solicits the "error" of queer desire it exists to foreclose. The essay's pivot is a 1994 New York Times report on a restaurant that installed televisions above its urinals so that male patrons could "feel like they're at home" — a gesture Edelman reads, through Freud's heimlich/unheimlich, as unwitting confirmation that "the men's room is an uncanny space where the gaze of the symbolic order sees male bodies into social meaning… a nodal point, ground zero, in the cultural compaction of masculinity into a logic of visual relations."

Key Claims

The men's room is "near allied" to the closet — "both as 'water closet' and as site of bodily relations discursively tabooed" — and, like it, "tends to lack windows"; where windows exist, translucent glass "precludes any visual commerce between the areas without and within" (pp. 103–104).
Mirrors substitute for windows, "satisfying the eye's desire for depth of field by returning its look to itself" — a "self-reflexive" segmentation of space that gestures "towards an idea of interiority, towards a principle of containment," modeling the subject "as container of space" (p. 103).
Though conceived as "a technological response to the hygienic concerns associated with bodily necessities," the men's room "constitutes a social technology in itself to necessitate a certain relation between the male subject and his body"; it "functions in excess of a logic of mere functionality" (pp. 103–104).
"The design of the men's room, simply put, has palpable designs on men; it aspires, that is, to design them" — the room gives the male subject his body "in its relation to symbolic space" (p. 104).
The law of the men's room is double: the law of heterosexual masculinity (the male body as requiring "consignment to a psychic space analogous to a closet") and the law whereby "the straight male body becomes a closet itself: a spatial enclosure for an autonomous subject" who conceives his body "simultaneously as container and thing contained; as being and needing a closet" — sheltered by patriarchy 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" (p. 104).
The men's room "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": the genitals, though "the 'private parts,'" acquire "a relatively 'public' status" at the urinal, while the anus bears "weightier burdens of social embarrassment" — "you don't show your ass in the men's room, and you don't conceal your dick" (p. 104).
The partition between stalls and urinals makes the room "like the U.S. Congress, strategically bicameral, allowing each part of its legislative body to hold the other in check"; the room is "camera lucida and camera obscura at once" (pp. 104–105).
The room proclaims "I am a camera" only insofar as it "operates more saliently as a factory for turning into cameras themselves all those who enter" — the law keeps watch "through every patron's eye – including, signally, their own – to see that what is publicly displayed is never directly observed" (p. 105): surveillance dispersed into the surveillers, a queer-theoretical panopticon.
Genital display at the urinal rests on one of two governing assumptions: the space is "consecrated, more or less explicitly, to the purposes of gay male sex," or the display "apotropaically declares its refusal" of that possibility; between them "the logic of the men's room compels the normative enactment of a vigilant nonchalance" (p. 105).
The question "Are you looking at me?" 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" (p. 105).
Gendered asymmetry of looking: "Whereas women may retreat to the powder room alone or even… in pairs – to attend… 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" (pp. 105–106).
The men's room "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'" (p. 106).
The penis "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" — phallicization "necessitates the ocularization" of the penis (p. 106).
Case study: the American Renaissance Restaurant (260 West Broadway, New York) inset two 13-inch Mitsubishi televisions above its black porcelain urinals (reported by Monique P. Yazigi, New York Times, 23 October 1994). Manager John Aron: "You would have to be a man to understand why we did it… Men usually have nothing to look at and they certainly don't want their eyes to wander"; the owner: "We want people to feel like they're at home" (p. 106).
The title "What Do Men Want? Perhaps, Says a Restaurant, Private TV?" passes, "at least allusively, through Freud's interrogation of female desire – as famously expressed in his much cited query, 'Was will das Weib?'" — confirming "a complementarity, like that of paired lavatory doors, that disavows any serious doubt about what men really want" (p. 107).
The TV's "association with the heimlich turns unheimlich in the bathroom, which is 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).
The televisions "only heighten in attempting to occlude" the truth: "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" (p. 108).
Edelman glosses Freud: the uncanny is "a distinctive type of 'home-sickness'" that "occasions a nostalgic longing for the sense of safety that 'home' once assured," signaling "a toppling of the walls within which the subject has been constructed and through which he has realized the imaginary architecture of a self" (p. 107).
The manager's contradiction ("nothing to look at" vs. eyes that "wander") resolves once the displayed genitals are understood to carry "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"; the prohibition "suffers under prohibition itself as something that every man must know but none must ever pronounce" (p. 108).
Note 1 condenses his earlier "Tearooms and Sympathy; Or, The Epistemology of the Water Closet" (Homographesis, 1994, pp. 148–170): against Lacan's "urinary segregation" — which "establishes the phallus from the outset as the token of anatomical difference" — the restroom should be read 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"; the phallus "articulates the concept of sexual difference in terms of 'visible perception'"; hence the stall's privacy "signals the potential anxiety at issue in the West when the men's room becomes the locus not of urinary but of intestinal relief," since that satisfaction "abuts dangerously on homophobically abjectified desires" and "must be isolated and kept in view at once lest its erotic potential come out" (pp. 108–109).

Connections

Concepts: mens-room · the-closet · gaze · homosocial-space · masculinity · privacy · gendered-space · gender-and-the-interior · separate-spheres · uncanny · voyeurism · interiority · corporeal-inscription · psychoanalysis · panopticon · boundaries · dining-room (the Victorian house's other "men's room") Authors: Lee Edelman · Sigmund Freud (the uncanny, "Was will das Weib?") · Taylor & Preston (Intimus editors) — Jacques Lacan ("urinary segregation," the symbolic gaze) referenced but not paged; Joel Sanders (editor of the original Stud) not paged Debates: power-and-space (Position N: the soliciting room) · phenomenology-vs-psychoanalysis (Position C: the psychoanalytic interior in practice) Related source notes: Proximities (Taylor & Preston 2006) — the Intimus editors' queer-theory framing ("destabilise implicit homogeneities," "home, privacy and publicity") that this chapter concretizes · The Partition of Space (Ardener 2006) — the sex-segregated bounded space with rules and gate-keepers · Movement and Myth (Croft 2000/2006) — privacy made and unmade by partitions · The waiting room (Hedges 2018) — the gendered public room-type · The Architectural Uncanny (Vidler 1992) — the uncanny's architectural theory · Freud for Architects (Abell 2020) — the psychoanalytic apparatus · Spatial seductions (Meninato 2018) — voyeuristic interiority · The Dining Room (Eastlake 1868/2006) — the after-dinner "men's room" of the Victorian house

Direct Quotes

"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." (p. 103)

"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." (p. 103)

"The design of the men's room, simply put, has palpable designs on men; it aspires, that is, to design them." (p. 104)

"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." (p. 104)

"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." (p. 104)

"The partition that distinguishes the privacy of the stalls from the 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." (pp. 104–105)

"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." (p. 105)

"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?" (p. 105)

"Whereas women may retreat to the powder room alone or even, to the comically theatricalized befuddlement of heterosexual 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." (pp. 105–106)

"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." (p. 106)

"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." (p. 106)

"'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.'" (Aron, quoted, p. 106)

"'We want people to feel like they're at home.'" (the restaurant's owner, quoted, p. 106)

"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." (p. 107)

"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." (p. 108)

"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." (p. 108)

"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'." (Edelman, "Tearooms and Sympathy," quoted in note 1, p. 108)

"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." ("Tearooms and Sympathy," quoted in note 1, p. 108)

"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." ("Tearooms and Sympathy," quoted in note 1, p. 109)

Open Questions

The excerpt breaks off mid-argument (the "(… p 157)" marker): what does the unexcerpted remainder of "Men's Room" add about the television case and the "logic of visual relations"?
Edelman's panopticon is horizontal and mutual ("every patron's eye – including, signally, their own") rather than centralized: does his "factory for turning into cameras" extend or refute Foucault's visibility apparatus — and does the men's room's self-surveillance confirm the thick edge's "self-administered" gate as a general mechanism of gendered space?
The TV above the urinal re-domesticates the public interior ("feel like they're at home") while Edelman insists the bathroom is "never to be conceptualized as a room wherein life could be lived": is the media-saturated washroom the limit case of the interior-as-sign-system, or the moment the room-type collapses into the living room?
The note's counter-Lacanian claim — the stall as "an older eroticism… anterior to the genital tyranny" — grounds queer potential in the pre-phallic body: can interior design work with that anteriority (the unpartitioned, the non-bicameral), or does any built washroom re-institute "urinary segregation"?
How does the men's room's economy of display/concealment translate to the wiki's feminine-coded rooms (the drawing-room of display, the dining-room of male withdrawal) — is Eastlake's after-dinner "men's room" of the house the same apparatus at domestic scale?
Edelman dates the essay to 1996; the urinal-TV predates the smartphone screen. Would his "logic of visual relations" hold for the phone-lit stall — the private chamber that has become its own "channel"?