Commemoration in 2008

Monumentalizing The List

“Memory … only accommodates those facts that suit it; it nourishes recollections that may be out of focus or telescopic, global or detached, particular or symbolic—responsive to each avenue of conveyance or phenomenal screen, to every censorship or projection … Memory installs remembrance with the sacred.” - Nora (8-9)

A project for “Women’s Peer Counselors Week,” run by female student employees of Residential Life, recently created a project inspired by The List. Four WPCs summarized the events of 1990, emphasizing the ability of individuals to use their voices to speak out and evoke changes (see main page). They attached these to large pieces of white paper which said “Express Youself!” across the top and put them up in bathrooms across campus this October. Their monument to the events in 1990 was on display for fewer than two days before it was taken down by janitors. Its importance is not in the memories it evoked in the few students that experienced it but rather in what it says about the social memory in its present form. What this monument, supported by the WPC program, actively commemorates and passively dismisses reflects what key leaders of the female Brown student body selectively remember of the generations before them and would like to claim as part of their heritage today.

The social memory of The List has lost a lot of its complexity and been falsely unified. Even in referring to the writing as “The List” a reduction occurs. The varied conversation of a large group of women is reduced to the homogeneous voices of a select few, namely the list writers and re-writers. The anonymity of the list further develops the false unity of story. Because social memory is unable to single out individual authors, all women at Brown in 1990 become the list’s authors to some extent. The conversation on the walls around the list helped voice other opinions. For instance, one dissenting woman warned against the dangers of making such a list, “Be careful, you could be ruining these men’s lives,” (Schmich) she wrote. Others refused to endorse The List by simply not participating, or by entering the conversation only through other forums such as the Brown Daily Herald, which hosted a very active conversation about not only “The List” but sexual assault in general. By only remembering The List itself, these voices are silenced. Reducing not only a bathroom conversation, but more broadly an entire social movement in the student body to a list of names serves to aggrandize the efforts of a few and forget, through their absence, the memories of the bulk of the student body. This reduction of the social memory is not only evident in the commemorative blurb created by the four WPCs, but also by the hearsay knowledge of the student body. In my research I found that a surprising number of students knew about the controversial “Rapist List” in the Rock bathrooms, but most treated it as an isolated act of expression that sparked change, rather than the most controversial effort to bring attention to sexual assault within the context of a larger social movement.

The social memory also romanticizes The List and the role this symbol played in the social movement. In talking to students, I found it was widely known among people who had heard of the events that the sexual assaulters list was eventually painted over in black in a desperate act to end the graffiti on the part of the University staff. Alas, the heroes of the collective memory seemed defeated. But the triumphant moment of this legend is yet to come. One current female student proudly recounted how the women in the 1990’s persevered and continued their defiance by writing over the black paint using silver pens and/or gel pens (she was unclear). In retrospect, the collective memory has latched onto the black paint as a symbol of the University’s suppression of expression, which is triumphed by determination and ingenuity. Although the use of black paint can be confirmed by a documentary (Klayman), its symbolism was not recognized by the student body in 1990. Not a single 1990 editorial in the BDH found the color of paint noteworthy, yet it is central to the current depiction of the heroic triumph of the bathroom writers over the University. Then The List makes its grand finale. In an unannounced collaborative effort, students copied down The List in notebooks and proliferated it throughout the University’s bathrooms. At this point The List ceased to be confined to the material and to the specific site where it was first written. This final triumph, attaining immortality by elusively multiplying and spreading, is commemorated in the WPC monument. The WPCs decided to post their tributes to the 1990 events in the Rock restrooms, but in the other restrooms historically associated with the spread, such as the Gate restrooms, with the addition of the science library bathrooms. In the wording on the commemoration, The List becomes an almost mystical element, “new lists kept popping up. They spread beyond the Rock to bathrooms on Pembroke and Faunce House” as if they were spread not by individuals but by the power of The List itself or the intangible will of the community of women.

Alcock, in “Archeologies and Memory” talks of the pride in associating oneself with a past: “Through their engagement in ritual activity along lines laid down millennia before, broader communities came to see themselves as part of an ongoing chain of activity, anchored back in a hallowed time” (9). It is essentially this kind of ritual activity which the monument created by the WPCs invited. The posters praised previous members of the Brown community for their activism, exaggerating the centrality of The List and romanticizing the heroism of the list writers and then tantalizingly invited the reader to participate him or herself (men’s restrooms were included) in this re-enactment of memory and thus take ownership of a heritage of collective empowerment through resistance. The intimate privacy of a bathroom stall seems in fact a perfect environment for a quiet reflection on the spirit of a place of memory and the power of the collective voice of anonymous women. I might have even imagined myself as one of the list writers, and felt a shiver as I wrote my message. These poster monuments, for a little over a day, invited students to participate in the creation of their own history, by attempting to link themselves to a successful struggle and revitalize a romanticized and consecrated time-place closed off forever: 1990, 2nd floor women’s restroom, the Rock.

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Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology