Abstract
Signs prescribing our permission to enter or abstain from specific places, such as those on toilet doors, mark murky borders between quasi-public and private space and have profound impacts upon our lives and identities. In this paper we draw on research which centred trans, queer and disabled people's experiences of toilet in/exclusion to explore how the signs on toilet doors shape disabled people's experiences of toilet access away from home and therefore their use of public space more broadly. We argue that the use of the International Symbol of Access (ISA) both delivers a false promise of accessibility and maintains the borders of disability through (re)enforcing a particular public imaginary of disability. We note the forced reliance on toilets in institutional and commercial settings when away from home and argue that, under capitalism, accessibility is persistently restricted by its potential to be lucrative.
Highlights
Considering our orientation to objects, Ahmed (2006, p.31) notes that ‘[s]ome things are relegated to the background in order to sustain a certain direction’
In this paper we explore how signs on toilet doors mediate access to toilet spaces for disabled people
We were and remain, interested in the questions posed by Titchkosky (2011, p.3): ‘What if access is much more than an individual state of affairs? What if access is much more than a substantial, measurable entity? What if it is more like a way of judging or perceiving?’ From the toilet, we have considered embodied relations between identity and the built environment and explored how space shapes whose lives are made possible and liveable (Jones and Slater, 2020; Pearce et al, 2019)
Summary
Considering our orientation to objects, Ahmed (2006, p.31) notes that ‘[s]ome things are relegated to the background in order to sustain a certain direction’. We write this paper following 10 years of austerity across Europe and North America, which continues to ‘harm the social infrastructures of coexistence’ (Shaw, 2019, p.973) Austerity has both dramatically reduced the number of publicly owned toilets – creating an increased reliance on private business provision (Slater and Jones, 2018) – and has had severely detrimental impacts on disabled people, leading to poverty, isolation and death (Ryan, 2019). One outcome of AtT was a list of recommendations; despite the difficulty we had in composing this list (due to a fear of diluting the complexity of experiences shared with us), we felt compelled to produce it, as participants told us that sometimes small, even imperfect changes, can make people’s lives easier These recommendations included altering signs (e.g. through removing gender markers or adding further access information) as a low-cost way of improving toilet accessibility (Slater and Jones, 2018). Before introducing further methodology and data from the project, we turn to outline our theoretical approaches to analysis in this paper: disability justice and collective access
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