Disturbing the dialectics of the public toilet with the water closet

With attention to the context of this women's bathroom, Halberstam comments that 'the policing of gender in the bathroom is intensified in the space of the airport, where people are literally moving through space and time in ways that cause them to want to stabilize some boundaries (gender) even as they traverse others (national). This may also be a way of stabilizing racial and cultural difference - the new bête noire of airport security - and the mediations of cultural and racial differences in gender representation. Viewed as a sequence that hangs on a wall in an art gallery, not only is an audience privy to the collective narratives that emerge, and the aesthetics of graffiti so familiar to us from public toilet doors but, also, we are encouraged to consider this graffiti as art.