Performative queer identities: masculinities and public bathroom usage

Abstract

This article critically examines the interface of gender, sex and identity within the context of bathroom facilities in a South African gay club. The public features and behaviors are contrasted with the bathrooms' private and abstract zones in terms of sexualized spaces and activities. The club's bathrooms function as spatial and physical discourses in which gender stability - with reference to masculine or feminine bodily inscriptions - is questioned. The bathrooms are understood as sites of parody practices in which dissonance between sex, gender and identity is made manifest.