I think theory should get in bed with architecture and stay there.
And I think that the design studio is the bed…
Catherine Ingraham

• Do you stand up to pee?
• Yup, most of the time.
• No, never.
• Well, I’ve tried it several times.
• It all depends on the effect I want to create. (Bornstein,1998 : 3)

1This paper will be an attempt to use the analysis of architecture as a starting point for considering the relationship between feminism and queer theory. Of course I will only analyse one small phenomenon of architectural production, and look at it through gender-tinted lenses. Nevertheless, the aim of this essay is not only to inspire discussion within feminist circles about queering feminism and everyday life, but it also hopes to inspire architects to introduce gender or queer perspectives into their works.

2Although I will be talking about Budapest, which has some of the finest architecture of the region, I will limit my attention to its public toilets and baths. After all, if one wants to ‘dismantle the Master’s house’, the best place to start could be (why not?) the Master’s toilet and bathroom. But I hope that this paper will be more than just another accusation of patriarchy written by another feminist. I want to claim that feminism itself is not ready for non-patriarchal architecture. Is non-patriarchal architecture therefore utopian? Not at all, the model of queer urbanity which I propose is very easy to implement. By discussing feminist reactions to these initiatives, I will show that the problem sometimes lies within the feminist movement, within ourselves.

3Feminism has a long history of having problems with its offspring: feminist art, feminist architecture, or queer theory, to mention just a few. The strongest theoretical foundation for my paper is the belief that the ultimate goals of feminism can only be achieved and removed from the sphere of mere utopia if the binary system governing our thinking is abolished. Taking queer theory as the way to deconstruct the binary system and the toilet as the setting for this deconstruction, I will talk about some queer renovations that have been introduced in Budapest recently. I will also describe the reactions of Hungarian feminists towards these innovations. The aim of this paper is not to criticize these reactions but just to show that some of the solutions seem utopian even for feminists.

SPACE AND GENDER, GENDERING SPACE

4What is the relationship between gender and space? How is space gendered? Is gendered space produced through intentional acts of architectural design according to the sex of the architect, or is it produced through the interpretative lens of architectural criticism. These are only a few questions which emerge while thinking about gender and space. Feminist analysis has made it clear that the relationship between gender and space is defined through power relations (Rendell, Penner and Borden, 2000: 102). The spaces allocated to men and women differ culturally, and space plays a particular role in symbolising, maintaining and reinforcing gender relations.

5The most pervasive representation of gendered space is the paradigm of « separate spheres », an oppositional and hierarchical system consisting of a dominant public male realm of production (the city) and a subordinate private female realm of reproduction (the home) . The origins of this ideology, which divides city from home, public from private, production from reproduction and men from women is both patriarchal and capitalist. In the « Manifesto of Women’s Environmental Rights » of 1981, we can read that: « The Built environment is largely the creation of white, masculine subjectivity. It is neither value-free nor inclusively human. Feminism implies that we fully recognize this environmental inadequacy and proceed to think and act out of that recognition » (Weisman, 1981: 4).

6Modern urban architecture is rooted in the masculine cult of the large, the erect and the strong. Although women make up more than 50 % of the users of space, they are denied any influence on architectural forms.

7The work of the Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre provides a useful theoretical framework within which to consider how representation helps produce, and is produced by, social space. Rather than considering the production of the urban realm simply through the activity of the building industry and urban design professions, Lefebvre is interested in how space is produced conceptually as well as materially. He suggests that the social production of space works through three different, yet interactive processes: « spatial practice » (material or functional space), « representations of space » (space as codified language), and « representational space » (the everyday experience of space). How can his theory be translated into a description of the space/gender relationship?

8Specific places may be sexed according to the biological sex of the people who occupy them or gendered according to the gender associated with the different kinds of activities which occur in them. For example, toilets are sexed male or female because they are occupied by men or women, while the domestic kitchen is gendered feminine because the activity of cooking is something that is socially associated with women. It is important to note that as well as being gendered through physical occupation, the different inhabitation of space by men or women, space is also produced as gendered through representation. Descriptions of gendered space make use of words and images which have cultural associations with particular genders to invoke comparisons with the biological body – for example, soft, curvaceous interiors are connected with women, and phallic towers with men. The architecture is continually re-produced through use and everyday life, and assumptions regarding sex, gender and space contained within this binary hierarchy are continually reproduced.

9Architectural production is influenced by gender (of the architect, of the users of space), and gender is constantly reproduced by gendered space. It is essential here to explain briefly the idea of gender as representation as formulated by Teresa de Lauretis. In her famous essay « Technology of Gender », she adopts Michel Foucault’s theory of sexuality as a « technology of sex » and proposes that gender, both as representation and as self-representation, is also the product of various social technologies, such as art, architecture, and of institutionalized discourse, epistemologies, and critical practices, as well as practices of daily life (de Lauretis, 1987: 2).

10Her conceptualization of gender as a representation just representation does not refute that gender has concrete or real implications, both social and subjective, for the material life of individuals. On the contrary, de Lauretis’ central claim is that the representation of gender is its construction – and in the simplest sense it can be said that all of Western Art and high culture is the engraving of the history of that construction.

11Feminist scholarship has shown in short that the sex-gender system is both a sociocultural construct and a semiotic apparatus, a system of representation which assigns meaning (identity, value, prestige, location in kinship, status in the social hierarchy, etc.) to individuals within the society. If gender representations are social positions which carry differential meanings, then for persons to be represented and to represent themself as male or as female implies taking on the whole of the remaining effects. Thus, the proposition that the representation of gender is its construction, each term being at the same times the product and the process of the other, can be restated more accurately. De Lauretis puts it simply: The construction of gender is both the product and the process of its representation (de Lauretis, 1987: 5), and goes on to say: The construction of gender is the product and the process of both representation and self-representation (de Lauretis, 1987: 9). Therefore, we can say that the construction of gender is also affected by its deconstruction, and can be reduced to mere ideological misrepresentation. I have mostly drawn on the text by Teresa de Lauretis, but similar analyses have been made by many other feminists working on film theory and visual culture. I have also used her text because she gives an example which is very relevant to my analysis of toilets and baths.

12Public toilets and baths are gendered in a very special way. They are spaces for private use delineated within the public space. The sexual difference is one of the strongest taboos of our culture, demonstrated by the separation of male and female toilets and baths. Anatomy is still a destiny: depending on which type of sexual organs we have, we are supposed to follow the F or the M path when we need to urinate or undress in public (space).

13In « Technology of Gender », de Lauretis gives an example of a person filling out an application form and ticking the F or the M. box (de Lauretis, 1987: 12). From the very first time we tick the litde square next to the F or the M. on the form, we have officially entered the sex-gender system, the social relations of gender, and have become en-gendered as women or men; that is to say, not only do other people consider us as respectively female or male, but from that moment on we represent ourselves as women/men.

THE MOST GENDERED SPACE

14This is of course the process described by Althusser as « interpellation », the process whereby a social representation is accepted and absorbed by an individual as real, even if it is in fact imaginary. Judith Butler takes this formulation further by exploring the ways that linguistic constructions create our reality in general through the speech acts we participate in every day. By endlessly citing the conventions and ideologies of the social world around us, we enact that reality; in the performative act of speaking, we « incorporate » that reality by enacting it with our bodies, but that « reality » nonetheless remains a social construct (one step removed from what Lacan distinguishes from reality by the term « The Real »). Butler’s theory demands to be applied to our ‘visual gendered acts’. By getting dressed in a certain way, by doing our hair in a certain way, we are doing gender every day. Now let’s go a step further: even if we do not want to conform to the conventional gender norms, when we go out in a public place we will obviously use the toilet. When doing so, we are forced to ‘choose’ the normative gender image which stands for the public toilet, we are doing (because we have to) a ‘visual gendered act’. This is how we repeatedly reinforce the stereotypes, conventions and socially superimposed gender norms.

15Thinking about the visual reiterations of past gender norms, past elements of fashion and past manners, the process or endless citations Butler talks about comes into focus. More than that, the toilet signs are the clearest visual proof of how gender is « a corporeal style », an ‘act’. What is required for the hegemony of heteronormative standards to maintain power is our continual repetition of such gender acts in the most mundane of daily activities (the way we walk, talk, gesticulate, etc.) – and what else can one do when using those public spaces I have raised for discussion ? For Butler, the distinction between the personal and the political or between private and public, which basically defines public toilets, is itself a fictional idea designed to support an oppressive status quo: our most personal acts are, in fact, continually being scripted by heteronormative social conventions and ideologies.

16We are supposed to renew our declaration of gender every time we face the door of the toilet or baths. An excellent study of Budapest’s toilet signs has been carried out by Patricia Nedelea. She shows how rigid the symbology used to mark toilets is in Hungary and how much it perpetuates the patriarchal normative politics of gender. She divides Budapest’s toilet signs into three categories: standard, personalized and alternative. Of course most of them belong to the very rigid system of dividing everything in two according to possession or lack of a penis. Nedelea concludes that there is only one alternative for a person who does not want to enter the game of interpellations when going through the toilet door: to choose the toilet for the disabled.

17I am afraid that this situation is similar in most places. Simone de Beauvoir, discussing toilet training in The Second Sex, believed that teaching little girls to squat to urinate constitutes « the most striking sexual differentiation » of their childhood. She explained that « to urinate, (the little girl) is required to crouch, uncover herself, and therefore hide: a shameful and inconvenient procedure » (Beauvoir, 1969 : 65). Whereas boys are taught to control their urine stream through handling their own penis, girls are taught that their sexual organs are taboo.

18Is there any way of doing what we need to do and avoid choosing between the M. and the F?

19In 2004, at Glastonbury, one of the United Kingdom’s largest music festivals, a radical improvement was introduced: She-Pee, a pink fenced-off enclosure containing urinals for the exclusive use of women (guards stood at the entrance to keep men out). Once inside, intrepid female users were supplied with P-Mate, an effective and disposable prosthetic penis made of cardboard that enabled them to pee standing up. At about that time, I found myself standing in a queue at a female toilet in one of Budapest’s concert halls with Gabriella Bartha, a Budapest-based Romanian artist, who happens to be my friend, complaining about the length of the queue and the speed of progress. We hadn’t heard about Glastonbury then, but we agreed that the situation in Budapest’s toilets was intolerable. While complaining in the queue, we did not mention problematic issues of interpellation, did not think about passages from de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, or comments made by Monique Wittig about lesbians refusing to be put into the category of woman, we simply discussed the possibility of shortening the queuing time. What could be done: More toilets? Different clothes? Peeing standing up?

20This year, while starting preparations for the first LadyFest to take place in Hungary, I knew that I must persuade Bartha to take responsibility for the toilets at our venue. She did some research and prepared the great She-Pee inspired plan of reducing the problem. Apart from designing a urinal for girls and shooting a short instruction movie about how to make a peeing cone from scrap paper and use it efficiently, she also agreed to organize a zipper workshop with a professional seamstress to alter our trousers in order to by-pass the grimy and over-subscribed loos of our venue – the Kultiplex Club.

21To my great surprise, my co-organizer feminist colleagues refused to give their consent for this initiative. Why? Well, apart from getting a vague « engem nem izgat a pisi » (Peeing doesn’t interest me), and some accusations of penis envy, I wasn’t given any rational arguments.

22It seems that we are so used to the sexed nature of toilets that any solution offering a subversive use of them meets with criticism.

23Another example of the possibility of introducing deconstructive strategies, which was also rejected by the feminist milieu, is Hungarian baths. Budapest seems the most natural destination for people who want to take the waters. The city is situated on 123 hot springs, and people have been bathing in them since at least the fourth century B.C. After the Celts came the Romans, then the Magyars, Turks and Hapsburgs. While most of the baths in Budapest have always followed a rule of assigning alternate days for exclusive female or male use (except Szechenyi which is open to both sexes), Rudas Bath has always been an exclusively male bath. It was built in 1550, and reconstructed by Pasha Sokoli Mustafa in 1566. Some of the Turkish-period features are still in use today: the octagonal pool, the four small corner pools, each with water of a different temperature, and the characteristic Turkish dome. Paradoxically, this oldest and most traditional bath was the first to offer an option for those who do not feel like a bath-need-provoked gender interpellation. Rudas, which has never been open to women, re-opened in December 2005 after two years of reconstruction, and surprised everyone with an invitation to mixed-gender bathing three times a week. This aroused extensive debate in the Hungarian media about discrimination against women in the baths. Interestingly, again no-one asked about a mythical lesbian shivering at the thought of being put into the « woman » category, about a transsexual or transvestite. I understand that feminism stands firstly for women, but it is also supposed to protect minorities and fight normative practices.

24These examples show how we were given an opportunity to introduce a strategy for abolishing a heteronormative system in Budapest and rejected it.

DECONSTRUCTING FEMALE/MALE

25My claim is that although both ideas, to pee standing up and mixed-gender baths, were rejected by feminist circles, they should actually be seen as the way to deconstruct the male/female polarity of the separate spheres. Jacques Derrida’s work aimed to expose the ways in which binary systems allow things to be only « like » or « not like » the dominant category, and replace such prevailing intellectual norms with new formulations.

26Following Derrida’s ideas, the first step in the process of deconstruction would be the strategic reversal of binary terms, so that the term occupying the negative position in a binary pair is placed in the positive position and the positive term placed in the negative position (when we teach women to pee standing up, we can organize seated urination for males). The second type of strategy would be a movement of displacement, in which the negative term is displaced from its dependent position and located as the very condition of the positive term. Jane Rendell analyses this option and states that the appropriation of public space by women can be an empowering and political act (personal is political) (Rendell, 2000: 105). The third possible strategy is intervention, whereby a new term is created or discovered which defies categorization within a binary logic. Such a term must operate simultaneously as both and neither of the binary systems; it may include both and yet exceed their scope, so indicating the inadequacy of the separate spheres as a description of gendered space. Instead of constantly dividing in two, let us look for a third category opposing the binary division: queer day in the baths?

27Nevertheless, both ideas were harshly criticized and rejected, mostly by feminists. Does this suggest that the abolition of male/female division is utopian? Ultimately, this aim is not in fact so revolutionary.

WHAT TO DO IS ABOLISHING DIVISION: UTOPIAN?

28The term « utopia » is the combination of two Greek words – « not » (ou) and « place » (topos), thus meaning « nowhere » or more literally, « not-place ». The word « utopia » was created to suggest two Greek neologisms simultaneously: outopia (no place) and eutopia (good place) . In this original context, the word carried none of the modern connotations associated with it. Marge Piercy, the author of the most famous feminist utopia, did not talk about architecture in her book, Woman on the Edge of Time. The poor Chicano single mother has more important problems to deal with than teaching her daughter how to pee standing up, not to mention that she could not afford a spa weekend in Budapest. I am not claiming that the issues described above are of key importance. Still, they illustrate how feminist scholarship is largely silent on ways in which gender and space are represented, which is very important when thinking about the dialectical relationship of gender and space. Our debates lack explicit discussion about the role of representation in negotiating the complex relationship between gendered identities and urban spaces. In this paper, I have tried to give an example of heteronormative public discourse practice which reinforces the patriarchal rule and is defended and promoted by feminism. My aim was to queer Budapest’s map, but my conclusion is that it is Hungarian feminism which needs queering. Queer theory and practice should be used as means of achieving feminist goals. Where architecture is concerned, there is a growing need for queer space. It should be space that questions its own identity, the identity of the users, revealing them as constructions and rendering them susceptible to redefinition. Queer theories should be used as a framework for reading designated open public spaces. So far, queer space has been theorized almost exclusively as the space acquired, occupied, and adapted by queer people for their needs. This notion should be reconfigured; there is a need to reframe reliance on a broader understanding of the term queer itself. The spatial environment in itself can also be seen as a queer space. Queer urbanity may be a poetical and peaceful reconciliation of space and the individual, both relieved of their quest for any fixed identity.