2nd floor Rock women's restrooms (1990).swf
notes about the movie clip.doc
For as long as anyone can remember, the walls of the bathroom stalls in the Rockefeller library’s women’s restrooms have been creatively put to use for personal musings and anonymous conversations. Within this continuum of performed habit-memory, however, there is a distinct bathroom and time of particular legacy: Fall of 1990 second floor Rock women’s restroom. In the beginning of the fall semester of 1990 a conversation was started by women writing on the walls of the bathroom stalls that centered on sexual assault and the Brown administration’s policies toward alleged rapists and rape survivors. An anonymously and collaboratively created list of Brown rapists emerged from the conversation, which was continually erased by the University and rewritten by the female student body. Initially the list was contained in just the one bathroom, but after it “reappeared at least a half a dozen times, yielding at least a dozen names, and was vigilantly erased” (Bell) it eventually spread to other bathrooms across campus. The bathroom conversation gained attention when a female student violated the code of the space by allowing men into the conversation. She wrote an editorial in October about the graffiti in the Brown Daily Herald which sparked a fiery campus-wide debate that eventually changed Brown’s policy on sexual offenses (Ngai).
Connerton argues that revolutions always start with remembrance. In his key example, French revolutionaries revoked kingship by citing rites that confirmed the authority of kings. Decapitation was effective as a symbol because it directly related to and opposed coronation. One female graffiti writer inadvertently made explicit a similar dynamic in the restroom writing when she complains that “There is anti-women graffiti all over this –ing campus” (Ziner). The graffiti writers were using a medium, bathroom graffiti, which has in social memory a firmly established connection to the institutionalized disempowerment of women by men through slander. The women chose to empower themselves through a medium traditionally employed for the opposite purpose of perpetuating male dominance. Following the lead of French revolutionaries, they forged a new rite by citing the one it replaced.
The memories associated with the bathrooms in the student body attending brown in the early 90’s are varied and complex. However, the last large group of individual eye-witness accounts were scattered after the graduation of the class of ’95 and their stories became, for the most part, inaccessible to subsequent generations of the Brown student body. For the last 14 years since, however, the community has sustained fragments of ever-evolving stories and memories. The result is that a selectively simplified legacy of the Rape List and the struggle of the community of women who created, perpetuated, and supported it through individual private scribblings in a bathroom stall lives on in the Brown community today, nineteen years later.
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