Today: a new dissertation topic for the oppositional thinker. In keeping with my new humanitarian tradition of supplying ace diss topics entirely free of charge, wholly out of the good of my giving heart (see my June 7 blog), I share this one in the hope that it may help some stumped grad student launch the lead balloon commonly known as a doctoral thesis. This is an all-purpose topic, guaranteed to work in a variety of disciplines (sociology, history, English, American studies, women's studies, education, possibly even political science, law, philosophy, and urban studies).

Title IX in the Toilet: TP, PC, and the Sexual Politics of the Bladder

A fabulous dissertation could emerge from a close, Geertzian analysis--a thick description, if you will--of the misogynistic restroom renovations that were recently completed at the University of Michigan's historic Hill Auditorium. The newly expanded women's room has thirty toilets (as compared to twenty-two in the newly renovated men's room). But having eight more toilets than the guys does not, in the eyes of feminist legal theory, constitute adequate affirmative action (bear in mind that Ann Arbor is Catharine MacKinnon country). According to attorney Jean King, women should get forty-four toilets--twice what the guys get--in order to have an equal opportunity to pee during intermission. Anything less, claims King in her complaint to the U.S. Department of Education, is sexual discrimination and thus violates Title IX. King claims discrimination despite UM's clear compliance with state law requiring one toilet for every 65 patrons (by law, UM needed only to supply 28.5 toilets).

This episode could provide grist for many enterprising dissertators in a variety of fields. It's a wonderful cultural set piece--akin to Geertz's Balinese cockfight--and offers similar opportunities for broad theorization (which is the best kind in the paradigm-happy world of cultural theory). At the heart of that broad theorization will be a new, remarkably ripe category for materialist feminist work: the bladder. Though full to bursting with analytical potential, the bladder has remained something of an empty signifier for feminists, who have yet to tap its political and ontological potential. Events at Michigan show that the time is right for the bladder to make its entry into feminist legal and cultural theory. It's been nearly twenty years since Joan Scott argued that gender was a useful category of historical analysis. Now is the time to particularize. "Title IX in the Toilet" (title optional) stands to revolutionize radical critical praxis by showing definitively that the bladder is a useful category of feminist-historical critique.

On a philosophical level, the female bladder offers a fresh approach to an otherwise tired debate within feminism over the problem of "woman's nature." The crux here is that this is one body part that behaves according to radical feminist norms. The female bladder is a site of women's inborn resistance to patriarchal hegemony, and as such it reconciles the longstanding conceptual rift between essentialist and social constructivist feminisms. Carnivalesque in its disregard for rules, manners, time, and place, it is an anatomical upstart, a bodily rebel with a radical cause. Small and pushy, impatient and unwilling to wait, the female bladder is a model feminist organ. Needing to pee everywhere, all the time, no matter what, it cannot be contained by institutionalized norms of bladder endurance. The female bladder thus exposes and undermines the stoical historical standard of urinary retention, revealing the masculinist privilege embedded in the assumption that all bladders ought always to be wholly contained, tightly controlled, and infinitely able to repress their needs. As such, the bladder ought to replace the womb as the synecdoche for woman: where the one speaks anachronistically to woman's maternal instincts, the other speaks progressively to the sheer, unapologetic activism of her physiology.

On a political level, the battle over bathroom space in Ann Arbor shows definitively that--contrary to the unimaginative and reactionary claims of equity feminists--the work of fighting patriarchal hegemony is never done. To dismiss the dispute at Michigan as petty, or to see it as simply a question of architectural limitations, is to miss the point. The real issue raised by the battle over bathroom space is the issue of women's rights itself. Without a place to pee, women cannot function effectively in the public sphere. Depriving women of adequate bathroom facilities is, indeed, akin to footbinding or corsetry in its capacity to impose debilitating physical constraints on women who would otherwise pose serious threats to male dominance. A bursting bladder hobbles a woman, prevents her from functioning at peak capacity, and contributes to the paucity of women at the highest levels of business, academe, and government. The urinal is political. If we want more women CEOs, full professors, and elected officials, we need to build women more bathrooms.

The possibilities (pissabilities?) here are endless. This is a topic that will make the career of the graduate student who can just relax into it, and go with its own natural flow. Provided, that is, that the student has easy, unfettered access to a bathroom.