Piss(ed): The Biopolitics of the Bathroom

Abstract

This article analyzes two recent works by transgender performance artist Cassils, PISSED and Fountain (2017), which were created in response to the Trump administration's decision to rescind federal protections allowing transgender students to use the restroom of their choice. While Cassils primarily conceptualized PISSED/Fountain as a queering of binary, essentialist understandings of gendered embodiment, I draw on performance, queer, and critical ethnic studies to illustrate that these pieces simultaneously challenge other kinds of oppositional embodiments, particularly health versus disease and citizen versus alien and/or terrorist; conceptualizations the state frequently deploys to surveil and control marginalized populations. PISSED/Fountain offer audiences a new strategy for both exposing and contesting state violence: these pieces can be read as a politically strategic disidentification with the state's classification of certain bodies and their excretions as ``deviant'' and ``toxic'' in order to purposefully ``terrorize'' the state's bio- and necropolitical aims.