November 18, 2015 - 16:35
Surfing Wikipedia today for my Technology in Education and Society class, I stumbled across the Bryn Mawr College page. Listed in the basic information section is our motto: Veritatem Dilexi--"I delight in the truth."
Reading Rich's piece on the relationship between womanhood, truth, and lying, I feel compelled to explore the significance of this motto in a women's space. Rich writes of "deceitful" position into which women have historically been forced--they have been required to silence parts of themselves and ask for the truth only from others, as part of their nurturing role. Rich deems this silencing "lying," failing to tell the truth through omission. She demands that women strive for more "honorable" relationships among themselves, that they support one another by being truthful always and asking the same of each other. It seems that Rich would see women's colleges as opportunities for this truth-telling to take place; in a space without cis-men, we are perhaps especially responsible to be honest with one another, as we are truly given the opportunity to do so. She does add, still, that safe spaces are created through sharing truth, and therefore would likely claim that we don't need a women's college to speak our truths.
Researching the motto further, I was led in a slightly different direction. I came upon a blog post written by a Bryn Mawr Gender & Sexuality Studies major, entitled "Veritatem dilexi: Lesbian." The student explores the history of lesbianism at the college, and cites a poem written by a Judith Masur, a Bryn Mawr alumna who graduated in 1968:
The student blogger responds:
"'Veritatem dilexi' means I delight in the truth. Which truth is left ambiguous, but is implied to be the existence of lesbians at Bryn Mawr. It is easy to see how lesbianism can be an eternal truth of Bryn Mawr: from M. Carey Thomas's journals, to Applebee's eponymous column, to the open mic nights of today, literary expressions of lesbianism are threaded through our history like one strand in a complex tapestry" (Levitin 2014).
I am brought back to Rich's piece, and her references to female sexuality. As she writes: "Heterosexuality as an institution has also drowned in silence the erotic feelings between women. I myself lived half a lifetime in the life of that denial. That silence makes us all, to some degree, into liars" (Rich 190).
So Rich might argue that lesbianism is not just the truth of Bryn Mawr--it is the truth of all womanhood, and living our lives in denial of this is an extreme form of lying by omission. So then--what of the danger of being out? Claiming one's sexuality is certainly not as simple as denouncing the silencing system of heteronormativity. Wendy Brown recognizes the complexity here, and the various consequences one must weigh when choosing whether or not to "confess" to a deviant identity. She explains: "What each case makes clear is that while to be invisible within a local discourse may occasion the injuries of social liminality, such suffering may be mild compared to that of radical denuncation, hystericization, exclusion, or criminalization" (Brown 87). Rich, on the other hand, is far less forgiving. For her, an individual's suffering as a result of telling the truth is a risk worth taking, and certainly nothing compared to the world we might achieve if we were all honest, all the time. She writes:
"Does a life 'in the closet'--lying, perhaps of necessity, about ourselves to bosses, landlords, clients, colleagues, family, because the law and public opinion are founded on a lie--does this, can it, spread into private life, so that lying (described as discretion) becomes an easy way to avoid conflict or complication? can it become a strategy so ingrained that it is used even with close friends and lovers?" (Rich 190).
I'm struggling with this, and it seems just a little bit too harsh for me. How can Rich claim that being closeted is an "easy way to avoid conflict," when that conflict can (and has, so many times), quite literally, result in physical violence and death?
And how does Bryn Mawr fit into this? Every white queer woman here with whom I have spoken has expressed a sense of freedom, and a joy in being out, at least on campus. And still, queer women of color frequently share with me different stories. While I know that Rich writes keeping in mind these intersectional identities, it is hard for me to get on board with the claim that queer women of color have to work harder, even within an institution whose "truth" is supposedly lesbianism.