2025 Theses Doctoral

Embodied Politics: A Social Movement History of the Public Bathroom in the Modern United States

Shepard, Nikita

This dissertation documents the central role of the public toilet within conflicts over inclusion, public space, and social justice across the United States from the 1920s to the present. Using a comparative social movement approach, it traces how Black civil rights, homophile and gay liberation, feminist, and trans activists engaged bathrooms as sites and symbols of struggle, and how their opponents inflamed racist and anti-feminist moral panics focused on toilets to undermine them, laying the groundwork for today’s anti-trans backlash.

The first chapter draws on NAACP archives and government records to document how racial justice advocates and segregationists contested bathrooms in the nation’s interstate transportation carriers, workplaces, and schools from 1920 to 1957. By challenging the specifically gendered humiliations of racially segregated bathrooms, Black activists asserted gendered recognition as central to their claims to citizenship and public participation. In response, segregationists deployed racialized toilet panics centered on perceived threats to white women and girls that would serve as a template for future bathroom conflicts. The second chapter follows shifts from the 1950s to the 1990s in how homophile and gay liberation movements related to sex between men in public bathrooms. While earlier activists outwardly disavowed public sex, many of the homophile movement’s few early political victories centered on community organizing or court cases in response to bathroom policing. By contrast, post-Stonewall radicals viewed bathroom sex with ambivalence as they drew new distinctions between homosexual behavior and gay political identity, while their moderate successors drew on the legacy of Laud Humphreys’ Tearoom Trade study to craft a conception of privatized, respectable gay citizenship complicit with policing and surveillance of public space that shapes LGBTQ politics to this day.

The third chapter considers feminist efforts to challenge the physical infrastructures that limited women’s participation in public life through a case study of the role of conflicts over gendered bathroom access in the transition to coeducation at Yale University from 1968 to 1979. While the inadequacy of facilities for women sparked intra-institutional conflict and feminist activism, Yale and other campuses responded to gendered and racialized conflicts over safety by coding public bathrooms as sexually dangerous for women, laying the groundwork for the gendered bathroom panics to come. The fourth chapter examines trans activism around public bathroom access from the late 1960s to the 2010s, not as a culture war issue but a necessity for economic survival. Building on early self-help efforts and legal activism, bathrooms first emerged as a political issue from the 1980s forward, though frequently posing a barrier to trans rights claims. Twenty-first century activists began to succeed in campaigns for anti-discrimination ordinances and grassroots organizing for bathroom access at schools and workplaces. But from 2008 forward, a conservative coalition drew on segregationist, anti-feminist, and child protection themes to use bathrooms to catalyze the anti-trans backlash that plays a central role in American politics today.

The conclusion analyzes overarching themes around labor, sexuality, the power of bathroom panic to warp social reality, and the role of analogies within political organizing. I analyze the “bathroom publics” produced by public toilets and argue that refocusing on histories of public bathroom activism necessitates a new theory of historically grounded embodied politics to reimagine justice in the twenty-first century.