Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies

Public bathrooms have historically and consistently been sites of societal tension and discourse, used as symbols of isolation, discrimination, and shame for many people in marginalized communities. Whether through racial segregation in public facilities up through the Jim Crow Era (Wade, 2015, 1), or current anti-trans bathroom ban legislation that prohibits the use of gender-congruent bathrooms for trans or gender-nonconforming individuals (MAP, 2025, 1), the public bathroom remains at the center of many racist, transphobic, and colonial discourses. It has been socialized as a space that enforces colonial systems of oppression, such as gender and race binaries, allowing others the privacy needed to enact violence against these marginalized communities. With this context, it is imperative to recognize forms of resistance and resilience within these spaces, such as bathroom stall graffiti. In my research, I will analyze bathroom stall graffiti found in the first-floor women’s bathroom in Hart Hall, looking closely at how language, space, and social discourse interact to transform the experience of this public-private structure. I will analyze images and data collected from the bathroom stall over the past 13 months and frame them within current conversations surrounding gender reproduction in public bathrooms, graffiti’s contributions to maintaining queer spatiality, and how its erasure acts as a form of cultural reproduction and policing within the university institution.

This paper will analyze the linkages between student-based decolonial and anti-war movements in solidarity with Palestine and Vietnam. I will be doing a close reading analysis of the student newspaper, Third World News, which was published by students of color at UC Davis from the 1970s to early 2000s. The newspaper was created because students of color felt they weren't being represented by their university and created a platform to voice their ideas, concerns, and cultures. The newspaper allowed students to recognize their shared struggles and to spread awareness of different forms of oppression from around the world. In particular, my study will focus on the work of the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF), which was founded in the late 1960s when US-based non-white communities felt a strong connection between  struggles of Third World peoples, and US communities of color. TWLF focused on collective action in pursuit of collective liberation and self-empowerment. This helped inspire solidarity movement building between Vietnam and Palestine, as well as other groups fighting for liberation. Many parallels were drawn between Vietnamese and Palestinian liberation, as well as anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggles across the world. My research project considers how the similarities between Palestine and Vietnam elicited solidarity in social movements, particularly in student organizing. 

Solidarity building helps marginalized communities to recognize their shared struggle and oppression. Often, solidarity is obscured and erased, impeding the capacity for communities of color to come together and make change. This project unearths an important solidarity linkage that is purposefully obscured by dominant media and helps shed light on the importance of coalition building and student activism.

In the climactic finale to the first act of Oscar Wilde's 1895 play An Ideal Husband, Gertrude Chiltern convinces her husband, a Member of Parliament, not to support the construction of a boondoggle Argentinean canal. Gertrude, not her husband, is the ostensibly moral character here, since the canal's only purpose is to create wealth for its stockholders, but the language she uses in this impassioned speech quotes Guinevere, the contrite fallen wife in Alfred Tennyson's Idylls of the King. Near the end of the Idylls, recognizing that her infidelity has occasioned war, turmoil, and the end of Arthur's reign, Guinevere laments: Ah my God, What might I not have made of thy fair world, Had I but loved thy highest creature here? It was my duty to have loved the highest: It surely was my profit had I known: It would have been my pleasure had I seen. We needs must love the highest when we see it (G 649-56) Repeating these words and ideas under drastically different circumstances, Lady Chiltern tells her husband in the finale to Wilde's first act: I don't think you realise sufficiently, Robert, that you have brought into the political life of our time a nobler atmosphere, a finer attitude towards life, a freer air of purer aims and higher ideals - I know it, and for that I love you, Robert.. I will love you always, because you will always be worthy of love. We needs must love the highest when we see it! (Ideal 69).