On Stalling and Turning

Abstract

This series of elliptically interrelated autotheoretical vignettes offers a “wayward genealogy” of how the author came to be involved in the Stalled! public toilet redesign project and what that project entails. The article revolves around observations of the actions of stalling and turning and of the spatial imaginaries that make these actions both necessary and legible in a variety of contexts—of watching pelicans dive into the Pacific Ocean, living on the grounds of the Dachau concentration camp, encountering transphobic feminism, researching San Francisco's urban history, and reading psychoanalytic theory, among others. After describing the origins of the Stalled! project in recent public discourse on “transgender toilets,” and its practical designs for abolishing the gender binary in space, the article suggests that concepts of transness make sense only in relation to a spatial configuration on which the logic of the term depends: it requires difference and separation as a precondition of its transversal operations, even as it demonstrates how other arrangements—other floor plans, not just of sex and gender but of space and time and sociality—are possible.