Aaron Roland Endowed Lecture: "Bathroom Anxiety: Purity, Disgust, and the Dilemmas of Being Human" with Judith Plaskow

Aaron Roland Endowed Lecture: "Bathroom Anxiety: Purity, Disgust, and the Dilemmas of Being Human" with Judith Plaskow
Date
Thu March 9th 2017, 7:30 - 9:00pm
Event Sponsor
Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, American Studies Program, Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, Taube Center for Jewish Studies
Location
Levinthal Hall, Stanford Humanities Center

The Aaron-Roland Endowed Lecture

As the flurry of “bathroom bills” restricting access for transgender people in North Carolina and other states suggests, there is something about the topic of toilets that engenders intense anxiety, fascination and disgust.  Attitudes towards toilets and elimination are connected to understandings of what it means to be human as well as the ways social hierarchies are constructed and justified. The lecture will look at the relationship between attitudes towards toilets, excretion, and issues of access through the lens of Jewish sources.