ABSTRACT
The gendered logic of toilets must thus be understood in terms of white settler colonialism, capitalist consumer culture, heterosexuality, gender, disability and class-based exclusions. Gendered toilets are about policing sexual difference and mandating gender normality that is taught in the home. This chapter addresses the gap in the literature by offering preliminary notes on toilet training gleaned from interviews. The LGBT interviews demonstrate that the silence, the worry and the anguish in bathrooms and public toilets mirrors cultural preoccupations with gender and heterosexuality. The gendered cultural politics of urinary positions are, as evidenced by LGBT interviewees, alive and well in public toilets. The 1960s introduced a more child-friendly model of potty training, but continued to emphasize the gendering of elimination and to adopt an abstinence-based approach to masturbation, mirroring sex education in North American schools. The anxiety driving the gendered cultural politics of urinary positions, sitting or standing, is rooted in the early gendered teachings in the bathroom.
