Stalled! Beyond gender-segregated public toilets and towards equitable design – Conference

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About the conference

This conference explores and discusses the implications and challenges of inclusive facilities and socially just public design through the lens of gender-neutral public toilets. 

The conference's primary aim is to share experience, innovative research and practice around access and built space, as well as to propose innovative creative and critical ways of embedding diverse bodies into current and future projects and activities.
 
Stalled! London originated from the shared interests of the American based Stalled! team and The Bartlett School of Architecture to learn more about developments in gender-neutral and inclusive city planning in the UK built environment. Stalled! London aims to bring together academics, artists, and architects from across the UK working on the topic of public toilets from a social equity perspective as well as to identify commonalities and differences and share working practices and strategies trans-nationally.       
 
Some of the questions this conference seeks to address are:

• How have the historically and currently contested spaces of toilet provision in public buildings and spaces helped reproduce gendered, racialised and normative built spaces?
• How might we enable creative and critical debate that explores interrelationships between diverse bodies and the design of built space in innovative ways?
• How might we share innovative research and practice around access and built space into architecture so as to generate new kinds of conversations, attitudes and approaches to the built environment and urban planning?
• What alternative ways of designing and planning exist to meet the challenge of designing safe, sustainable and inclusive public toilets and related amenities?

About Stalled!

Stalled! was formed in America in 2015 to address the design consequences of legislation and court cases that would deny trans individuals access to sex-segregated public toilets aligned to their gender identity. The project assembles a cross-disciplinary research team that includes architect Joel Sanders, transgender historian Susan Stryker, and legal scholar Terry Kogan to explore this question from a cultural, political, legal, ethical, and architectural perspective.

• Read more about the Stalled! mission

Schedule

10:00 – 10:30 Arrival and registration

Coffee and tea will be served.

10:30 – 10:45 Welcome

A welcome talk from The Bartlett's Barbara Penner and author Jos Boys.

10:45 – 12:30 Panel 1: Stalled! team presentation

Law/Society/Architecture

10:45 – 11:05     Terry Kogan, Stalled: Legal Perspectives 
11:05 – 11:25     Susan Stryker, Stalled: Social Perspectives
11:25 – 11:45     Joel Sanders, Stalled: Architectural Perspectives
11:45 – 12:30     Panel Discussion

12:30 – 13:30 Lunch

Food and refreshments will be provided.

13:30 – 14:00 Speaker

Public toilets as translocal archives: queering space in Berlin
Ged Ribas Goody, founder of Archives in Transmission

14:00 – 15:00 Panel 2: Stalling London

Moderator: Susan Stryker, University of Arizona

Infrastructure and improvisation: toilet provision in London’s LGBTQ+ night venues
Ben Campkin, The Bartlett School of Architecture

Gender diversity and public bathrooms in Britain 
Lo Marshall, University College London

15:00 – 15:30 Refreshment break

Coffee and tea will be provided.

15:30 – 16:00 Speakers

Queer/Cripping the Convenience
Noemi Lackmeier, artist
Jos Boys, author and researcher, UCL 

16:00 – 17:00 Panel 3: Unstalling London

Moderator: Joel Sanders, Yale School of Architecture    

pissing it all away: toilets, gender and queer british art
Jessie McLaughlin, artist and curator    

Going Public(ly): what can public responses to changing toilet provision in cultural institutions reveal about attachments to gendered spaces?
Marianne Mulvey, curator, writer and educator       

17:00 – 17:30 Speaker

Purely Functional
Charles Holland, Charles Holland Architects and the University of Brighton 

17:30 – 17:45 Introduction to Creature Cramps

Creature Cramps is a performance artist and producer. They aim to disrupt the lines between Club Night, Gallery, and Theatre, creating work across venue descriptions and throughout the U.K.

17:45 – 18:45 Creature Cramps Performance 

Guidelines:
Please do not touch the performer or the objects in the space and be respectful that this is a non-verbal installation.

Description:
Urinal Residency is a live performance installation which challenges spaces where transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming bodies are surveilled and marked by a history of violence. Creature Cramps conflates the public setting of a men's toilet with the private experience of self-fashioning, highlighting the intimate relationship between architecture and the human body:

 “If we are not changing the structures of buildings, we are not changing the structures of our thinking. We need our spaces to reflect the nuances of the people who inhabit them” – Creature Cramps.

Drinks will be served. 

19:00 – 20:00 Drinks

Drinks and close, plus a Q&A with Creature Cramps.

Participants

Creature Cramps

Creature Cramps is a performance artist and producer. They aim to disrupt the lines between Club Night, Gallery, and Theatre, creating work across venue descriptions and throughout the U.K.

Creature Cramps presented their live performance installation, Urinal Residency, at The Victoria & Albert Museum as part of the gallery's curation around themes of Deconstructed Masculinities. The Live Art Development Agency (LADA) launched Urinal Residency and hosted the piece for the month of July 2018.  

Ben Campkin

Ben Campkin is Professor of History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism at The Bartlett School of Architecture and Co-Director of the UCL Urban Laboratory.

Ben is co-editor of Sexuality and Gender at Home: Experience, Politics, Transgression (Bloomsbury, 2017) and LGBTQ+ Night-spaces in London: Past, Present, Future, Urban Pamphleteer (2018), and co-author, with Lo Marshall, of LGBTQ+ Cultural Infrastructure in London: Night Venues, 2006-present (2017).

Ged Ribas Goody

Ged Ribas Goody is a trans researcher, founder of Archives in Transmission and a student on the Architectural & Interdisciplinary Studies BSc programme at The Bartlett School of Architecture. 

Charles Holland

Charles Holland is an architect, teacher and writer. He is the principal of Charles Holland Architects and a Professor of Architecture at the University of Brighton.

Terry Kogan

Professor Terry Kogan clerked for the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals and practiced law in Boston before joining the Law School Faculty of University of Utah in 1984.

He has spent the past decade considering the rights of transgender people, in particular issues surrounding the legal and cultural norms that mandate the segregation of public restrooms by sex. Terry has been active in gay and transgender politics in Utah, and serves on the Advisory Board of Equality Utah. He is a founding member of Stalled!

Jos Boys

Dr Jos Boys is a researcher, educator and journalist with a background in architecture, and is involved in feminist and community-based design practices.

Jos is author of Doing Disability Differently: an alternative handbook on architecture, dis/ability and designing for everyday life (Routledge 2014) and editor of Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader (Routledge 2017). Jos is Senior Lecturer of the new Learning Environments MSc at UCL, and is Co-Director of the DisOrdinary Architecture Project. 

Noëmi Lakmaier

Noëmi Lakmaier is an artist whose work explores notions of the ‘Other’ ranging from the physical to the philosophical, the personal to the political. The individual's relationship to its surroundings, identity, and perception of self and other in contemporary society are core interests in her predominantly site-responsive, live and installation-based practice. 

Lo Marshall

Lo Marshall is an urban geographer researching gender and sexuality at The Bartlett School of Architecture, the UCL Department of Geography and UCL Urban Laboratory.

Their doctoral research explores gender diversity through the lives of women, men and non-binary people with trans identities and/or histories who live in Britain. Additionally, Lo researches LGBTQ+ nightlife in London with Ben Campkin at the UCL Urban Laboratory, and recently guest edited Urban Pamphleteer #7: LGBTQ+ Night-time Spaces: Past, Present & Future (Campkin, Marshall and Ross 2018). 

Jessie McLaughlin

Jessie McLaughlin is an amateur artist, curator and wannabe footballer. They work from a soft, queer, brown (& sometimes sad) perspective, examining structures of privilege, oppression and exclusion and searching for joy and community.

They have worked with and for various organisations including Tate, Live Art Development Agency and Whitechapel Gallery. Currently, they are doing an ARHC funded Fine Art PhD with Goldsmiths and Tate. 

Marianne Mulvey

Marianne Mulvey is a curator, writer and educator. She is currently the recipient of a Collaborative Doctoral Partnership award between Tate and Royal College of Art to research public programming in art institutions.

From 2009-16 she was Curator of Public Programmes at Tate Britain / Modern. She has worked at The Arts Council Collection, Hayward Gallery and Gasworks, and was a Trustee of Fierce Festival in Birmingham 2014-18. She teaches at galleries and higher education institutions nationally and internationally.

Barbara Penner

Barbara Penner is Professor of Architectural Humanities at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. She is presently the school's Director of Research.

Barbara is author of Bathroom (Awarded RIBA President’s Award for Outstanding University-Located Research 2014) and co-editor of Sexuality and Gender at Home (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender (Temple University Press, 2014). In 2013, she co-organized the award-winning two-week UCLoo Festival, a festival devoted to all thing’s toilet, on UCL’s main campus.

Joel Sanders

Joel Sanders is an award-winning architect practicing in New York City and an Adjunct Professor at Yale School of Architecture. His work has been featured in numerous international exhibitions and belongs to the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Joel was the editor of Stud: Architectures of Masculinity (1995) and, he frequently writes about art and design, most recently for ArtForum and the Harvard Design Magazine. He is a founding member of Stalled!

Susan Stryker

Susan Stryker is Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at University of Arizona.

She is the author of Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution (2017), editor of The Transgender Studies Reader (2006) and The Transgender Studies Reader 2 (2013), and founding co-editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly.

She won an Emmy Award for the documentary film "Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria" (Frameline/ITVS 2005). She is a founding member of Stalled!

This event is generously supported by The Bartlett Research Fund

Image: Elmgreen & Dragset at Whitechapel Gallery, photograph by Jos Boys.

Access

All our event spaces are accessible. For any additional support or information, please email or call 020 3108 7337.