Post #1: Embodied Ideology in Physical Spaces -Catherine Lin

While brainstorming research project ideas, I took a look at the student projects featured on the Alfred M. Greenfield Digital Center website. One of these was We Are/We Have Always Been: A Multi-Linear History of LGBT Experiences at Bryn Mawr College, 1970-2000, which included a section on a 1988 bathroom graffiti incident describing how students had covered the Campus Center bathroom walls with pro-lesbian graffiti. The administration responded by painting over the graffiti. This reminded me of a small mention in one primary source printed in Offerings to Athena about feminist bathroom graffiti. I found these traces of how students took control of and altered physical spaces interesting because of how the architecture of Bryn Mawr is so infused with ideology. The idea of physical interventions made me think of the art in the servant tunnels I had seen during the Black at Bryn Mawr tour, and of how M. Carey Thomas had played a major role in influencing the Jacobean Gothic style that predominates at BMC. I thought it would be interesting to explore how community members, whether administrators or students, transformed physical space as a means of ideological expression, and when these transformations were contested.