Endnotes

Joel Sanders is a Professor at the Yale School of Architecture and the principal of JSA (Joel Sanders Architect).

 

1. Susan Stryker, “Transgender Studies: Queer Theory’s Evil Twin,” in GLQ, Volume 10, Number 2, 2004 p 214. For an account of the way transgender studies offers a critique of queer theory, opening up the possibility for more critical ways of conceptualizing identity, also see “Transgender History, Homonormativity, and Disciplinarity.” Radical History Review, Duke University Press Issue 100 (Winter 2008)

2. In Stud’ Introduction I elaborated this concept. “For example, dwelling locates itself within the house, research within the library, working within the office… Although purportedly outside the domain of politics, the way buildings distribute our activities within standard spatial configurations (building types) has a profound ideological impact on social interaction- regulating, constraining and (on occasion) liberating the human subject..[2]”

3. Ibid.

4. Since 2013, there have been a series of attempts to deny trans people access to the bathroom assigned to the gender which they identify, including Campaign for Houston to repeal HERO, an equal rights ordinance, North Carolina’s House Bill 2, and similar measures in more than two dozen other states. Most recently, the Trump administration has rescinded Title IX protections for transgendered students put forth by the Obama administration​. For a more detailed discussion of national restroom politics and how they tap into longstanding cultural anxieties about embodied difference, see Sanders, Joel and Stryker, Susan. “Stalled!: Gender Neutral Public Restroom,” in the South Atlantic Quarterly, 115:4, Michael Hardt, Durham: Duke University Press, October 2016.

5. Kogan, Terry, “Public Restrooms and the Distorting of Transgender Identity,” NC Law Review.

6.  According to Sonny Oram, founder of Qwear, LGBT fashion is both a form of “resistance” and a matter of “survival,” an essential resource that allows queers to align their outward appearance with their inner sense of self. Qwear profiles individuals who craft unique identities for themselves by establishing a dialogue between their bodies, which come in different builds, weights, and skin colors, and the clothing they wear. Miguel Raphael, profiled in the July 2017 issue, said that “his relationship with style is a living, visual representation of the different stages of his intersecting identities. A belief that has saved his life time and again.”

7.  If the discipline of architecture has since Vitruvius compared bodies and building, Le Corbusier, in his polemical writing added machines to the equation, famously describing the house as a “machine for living in.”

8. Prediado, Beatriz. “The Pharmaco-Pornographic Regime: Sex, Gender, and Subjectivity in the Age of Punk Capitalism.” In The Transgender Studies Reader 2. Eds Susan Stryker and Aren Z Aizura. New York: Routledge, 2013.

9.  The advent of science and medicine in the 19th century gave rise to new conception of the  the “normal” body, one that could be objectively studied, measured and that would form the basis of ergonomic design standards that became encoded in guidelines and regulatory codes that we have inherited to this day.  Douglas Baynton describes how medical arguments where used to justify discrimination against women, blacks, and immigrants because their bodies deviated from the norm in “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History.” in The Disability Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 2013.