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Talking About “Down There”: The Politics of Publicizing the Female Body through The Vagina Monologues
Abstract
This critical reading of The Vagina Monologues examines the play's circulation within dominant discourses of public and private and considers the ways in which the play works to reconfigure the female body and body-related issues as properly public. However, this article also begins to explore the potentially essentialist and reductive nature of the play's construction of female identity.
... It is charged with promoting lesbianism, sadomasochism, female masturbation, and heterosexual love with violence; practising double standards and dishonesty, equating men with 'the enemy', unremittingly portraying them as adulterers, abusers, weirdos, rapists, predators, and aggressors (McElroy, 2000(McElroy, , 2002(McElroy, , 2004Swope, 2000). TVM's expression of an ostensibly positive amplification of the vagina as part of a woman's subjectivity is seen as threatening, as it appears to reduce women to nothing more than their vaginas and vagina-related experiences (Kingston & Norman, as cited in Hammers, 2006). These and many other charges represent a force of resistance which also exists in China (cf. ...
The notion of ‘translation as adaptation and selection’ was first proposed by Hu Gengshen in 2001 with reference to the Darwinian principles of adaptation and selection. Based on oriental wisdom and occidental concepts, it has gradually developed into eco-translatology, an ecological approach to translation, clarified and refined in Hu’s later studies. Since its emergence, eco-translatology has attracted increasing scholarly attention, mainly in China, with some interest from outside China. However, little research concerns translation of feminist texts. This paper presents a feminist case of translation as adaptation and selection through the comparison of two Chinese translations of The Vagina Monologues. From a feminist vantage point in general, it examines the translators’ adaptive transformations in their linguistic, cultural, and communicative dimensions and the effects of the adaptive transformations in the translational eco-environment to explain why one translation gains better survival than the other in the specific translational eco-environment. It will demonstrate how the translators’ different degrees of multi-dimensional transformations influence the survival of the translations and/or the reception of Western feminism in China. It hopes to provide better understanding of eco-translatology and contribute to the further development of eco-translatology, as it is still in the process of growth.
This chapter illustrates how the post-colonial social and cultural constructions of African womanhood increase African—and more specifically Kenyan—women’s vulnerability to developing vaginal fistulas. It also discusses the theoretical underpinnings of gender inequality, power, and patriarchy, which paves the conversation on vaginal fistulas and their impact on women and girls.
This book explores translation of feminism in China through examining several Chinese translations of two typical feminist works: The Second Sex (TSS, Beauvoir 1949/1952) and The Vagina Monologues (TVM, Ensler 1998). TSS exposes the cultural construction of woman while TVM reveals the pervasiveness of sexual oppression toward women. The female body and female sexuality (including lesbian sexuality) constitute a challenge to the Chinese translators due to cultural differences and sexuality still being a sensitive topic in China. This book investigates from gender and feminist perspectives, how TSS and TVM have been translated and received in China, with special attention to how the translators meet the challenges. Since translation is the gateway to the reception of feminism, an examination of the translations should reveal the response to feminism of the translator as the first reader and gatekeeper, and how feminism is translated both ideologically and technically in China. The translators’ decisions are discussed within the social, historical, and political contexts.
Identifying recent historical instances of rhetorical shaming, such as the verbal and nonverbal shaming practices related to unwed motherhood during the mid-twentieth century, contributes to a diachronic study of mothering rhetorics that can queer more recent histories of motherhood. This article analyzes narratives of once-unwed mothers who cite shame as a primary factor that shaped their “decision” to surrender a child for adoption. As rhetorics of reproduction, these stories account for an unspoken raced and classed purity practice of hiding unwed pregnancy and erasing an illicit mother identity due to the threat of communicable shame. As reproducing rhetorics of shame, the narratives demarcate the pure from the impure and serve as a mechanism that figures unwed pregnancy as proof of what I call ontological failure.
This article advances a theory of affective rupture and explores its potential as grounds for coalition across substantial lines of difference. Using the unanticipated “outing” of gender-normative breast cancer patients at airport security checkpoints as a case study, I argue that it is in moments of unanticipated scrutiny and vulnerability that existing affective economies are disrupted and new affiliations are facilitated among groups with asymmetrical privilege and contesting agendas. In the case of breast cancer patients, I argue that this affective rupture at the security checkpoint can be grounds for coalition with transwomen who have been similarly mistreated by the Transportation Security Administration for their gender variance. I conclude with a brief sketch of the possibilities and limitations of such a coalition.
The Great Wall of Vagina, a polyptych consisting of four hundred labial plaster casts, publicly displays women's “privates” through a nine-meter artistic rendering of women's genital difference. On the occasion of the artwork's circulation, this article attends to the narratives crafted by the women who animate the Wall. Centering the women who make the project possible illustrates how affective intensities compel emotive discourses to circulate and to generate opportunities for shared bodily knowledges. The affective expressions of the women participating in the Wall not only invoke a sense of agency but also transform the contours of shame from private to public. To conclude, I suggest making vulvae visible builds contact zones wherein women are inspired to decouple notions of normality and bodily perception. By voicing their bodily affects, these women ask us to think carefully about what sensations, feelings, and matters of private concern might productively be brought into shareable and accessible venues. © 2015
By the mid-1990s feminist theorists and critics began to challenge conventional thinking about sex difference and its relationship to gender and sexuality. Scholars such as Anne Fausto-Sterling and Judith Butler troubled the sex-gender/nature-nurture divide. Some have asserted that these questions about sex are much too abstract to contribute to a valuable understanding of the material politics faced by feminist movements. In A Question of Sex, Kristan Poirot challenges this assumption and demonstrates that contemporary theories about sex, gender, identity, and difference compel a rethinking of the history of feminist movements and their rhetorical practices. Poirot focuses on five case studies-the circulation of Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?” in early and contemporary feminist contexts; the visual rhetorics of the feminist self-help health movement; the public discourse of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and early nineteenth-century ideas about suffrage, sex, and race; the conflicts over lesbian sexuality in the 1960s and 1970s; and the discourse that surrounds twenty-first-century SlutWalks. In the process, Poirot rethinks the terms through which we understand U.S. feminist movements to explore the ways feminism has questioned sexed distinctions and practices over time. She emphasizes the importance of reading feminist engagements with sex as rhetorical endeavors-practices that are shaped by the instrumental demands of movements, the exigent situations that call for feminists to respond, and the enduring philosophical traditions that circulate in U.S. political contexts., reviewing a previous edition or volume.
In 2001, a group of Mormon women scripted and performed the Mormon Vagina Monologues and presented their monologues at the annual Sunstone Symposium in Salt Lake City, Utah. Using the Mormon rhetorical mode of performed testimony, the monologists critiqued the facets of their patriarchal church that prohibit women from speaking publicly about sex and sexual experiences; simultaneously, the Monologues created a "sacred space" in which those testimonies—or seximonies—were valid and celebrated. This article argues that the Mormon Vagina Monologues captured the concept of the "utopian performative," a category within performance studies that describes work filled with promise, potential, and possibility. A number of monologues are examined here, divided into two groups: first, the voices of heterosexual women trying to navigate patriarchal authority while seeking sexual self-expression, and second, the voices of lesbian and transsexual male-to-female Latter-day Saints striving for acceptance and the right to enjoy intimate relationship.
In 2001, a group of Mormon women scripted and performed the Mormon Vagina Monologues and presented their monologues at the annual Sunstone Symposium in Salt Lake City, Utah. Using the Mormon rhetorical mode of performed testimony, the monologists critiqued the facets of their patriarchal church that prohibit women from speaking publicly about sex and sexual experiences; simultaneously, the Monologues created a “sacred space” in which those testimonies—or seximonies—were valid and celebrated. This article argues that the Mormon Vagina Monologues captured the concept of the “utopian performative,” a category within performance studies that describes work filled with promise, potential, and possibility. A number of monologues are examined here, divided into two groups: first, the voices of heterosexual women trying to navigate patriarchal authority while seeking sexual self-expression, and second, the voices of lesbian and transsexual male-to-female Latter-day Saints striving for acceptance and the right to enjoy intimate relationship.
The purpose of this thesis is to analyze a sampling of Gloria Steinem's feminist rhetoric by way of "If Men Could Menstruate" (1978/1983) and "What If Freud Were Phyllis?" (1994). I use a historical-descriptive methodology, in which I situate each essay in terms of their historical contexts, and I closely analyze Steinem's rhetoric in light of each historical situation. I also examine "If Men Could Menstruate" and "What If Freud Were Phyllis?" in terms of their enduring contributions. Towards this end, I consider whether or not these essays are touchstones of feminist criticism, meaning that a text meets audience demands and stands the test of time. Focusing on these two essays is necessary because they are memorable, they have received popular acclaim, they function as a pair, and they transcend the boundaries of second wave feminism.
Refuting the argument to choose between "the politics of recognition" and the "politics of redistribution," Justice Interruptus integrates the best aspects of both. ********************************************************* ** What does it mean to think critically about politics at a time when inequality is increasing worldwide, when struggles for the recognition of difference are eclipsing struggles for social equality, and when we lack any credible vision of an alternative to the present order? Philosopher Nancy Fraser claims that the key is to overcome the false oppositions of "postsocialist" commonsense. Refuting the view that we must choose between "the politics of recognition" and the "politics of redistribution," Fraser argues for an integrative approach that encompasses the best aspects of both.
Questions of the origin and scope of the public sphere have been framed in various ways by scholars over the past two decades. This essay explores the essentialist influences on this sphere from a feminist perspective suggesting that an essentialist ideology informs the public/private distinction. The public sphere, this essay argues, is not strictly a result of historical changes or economic influences; it also is dependent on an essentialist view of women and men. The kinds of communication that are privileged as a result of essentialist influences on the public sphere are considered as well.
Public Culture 14.1 (2002) 49-90
This essay has a public. If you are reading (or hearing) this, you are part of its public. So first let me say: Welcome. Of course, you might stop reading (or leave the room), and someone else might start (or enter). Would the public of this essay therefore be different? Would it ever be possible to know anything about the public to which, I hope, you still belong?
What is a public? It is a curiously obscure question, considering that few things have been more important in the development of modernity. Publics have become an essential fact of the social landscape, and yet it would tax our understanding to say exactly what they are. Several senses of the noun public tend to be intermixed in usage. People do not always distinguish between the public and a public, although in some contexts this difference can matter a great deal.
The public is a kind of social totality. Its most common sense is that of the people in general. It might be the people organized as the nation, the commonwealth, the city, the state, or some other community. It might be very general, as in Christendom or humanity. But in each case the public, as a people, is thought to include everyone within the field in question. This sense of totality is brought out in speaking of the public, even though to speak of a national public implies that others exist; there must be as many publics as polities, but whenever one is addressed as the public, the others are assumed not to matter.
A public can also be a second thing: a concrete audience, a crowd witnessing itself in visible space, as with a theatrical public. Such a public also has a sense of totality, bounded by the event or by the shared physical space. A performer on stage knows where her public is, how big it is, where its boundaries are, and what the time of its common existence is. A crowd at a sports event, a concert, or a riot might be a bit blurrier around the edges, but still knows itself by knowing where and when it is assembled in common visibility and common action.
I will return to both of these senses, but what I mainly want to clarify in this essay is a third sense of public: the kind of public that comes into being only in relation to texts and their circulation -- like the public of this essay. (Nice to have you with us, still.) The distinctions among these three senses are not always sharp and are not simply the difference between oral and written contexts. When an essay is read aloud as a lecture at a university, for example, the concrete audience of hearers understands itself as standing in for a more indefinite audience of readers. And often, when a form of discourse is not addressing an institutional or subcultural audience, such as members of a profession, its audience can understand itself not just as a public but as the public. In such cases, different senses of audience and circulation are in play at once. Examples like this suggest that it is worth understanding the distinctions better, if only because the transpositions among them can have important social effects.
The idea of a public, as distinct from both the public and any bounded audience, has become part of the common repertoire of modern culture. Everyone intuitively understands how it works. On reflection, however, its rules can seem rather odd. I would like to bring some of our intuitive understanding into the open in order to speculate about the history of the form and the role it plays in constructing our social world.
1. A public is self-organized.
A public is a space of discourse organized by nothing other than discourse itself. It is autotelic; it exists only as the end for which books are published, shows broadcast, Web sites posted, speeches delivered, opinions produced. It exists by virtue of being addressed.
A kind of chicken-and-egg circularity confronts us in the idea of a public. Could anyone speak publicly without addressing a public? But how...
This paper explores the relationship between female professional identity and cultural associations between femininity and the body, emotion and sexuality. The intersection(s) of existing professional discourses with social and theoretical discourses of the body render recent postfeminist and third‐wave feminist discourses, especially as they have been deployed and co‐opted by the media, particularly problematic for women professionals. Against this complex theoretical and social background the television series, Ally McBeal, as exemplified by the episode ‘It’s My Party’, operates as a useful case study of the dangers that the co‐optation of contemporary feminist discourse(s) poses for professional women.
In this essay, we explore how sensibilities of third-wave feminism are appropriated by and in the context of postmodern media such that they are commodified, reinscribed, and sold to audiences in an hegemonic fashion. To this end, we analyze gendered representations of women located at various mediated sites of popular culture in whom gender is conspicuous and primary: Alanis Morissette, Kate Moss, and Ally McBeal. We argue that, in each case, the appropriation of third-wave feminist tenets is accomplished via a postmodern aesthetic code of juxtaposition that serves to recontextualize and reinscribe those sensibilities in a way that ultimately functions to reify dominant patriarchal codes and discourses.
Our paper attempts to illustrate how a commitment toward telos enhances the critical process. We argue that self‐critical and “skeptical” scholarship is not an end in itself. Such work does not demonstrate, sufficiently, the contingent nature of criticism and its relationship to the society in which the critic is a member. Self‐reflective criticism isolates the critic and fates her to reproducing a lonely account of what culture is and how it functions. We call for an orientation toward criticism that acknowledges the contingent nature of meaning formation. Critics have a stake in the critical act itself and therefore should describe their purpose through telos. Telos is not teleological or Utopian; rather, telos is the continuous, ever changing purpose, as ephemeral and enduring as putting pen to paper, of the critic and society. It is the temporary fixing of meaning that admits the political nature of criticism, hence its need to affect change. We offer three examples of what a commitment toward telos would do. We then contextualize our own criticism by showing how it sustains traditions of thought, even while offering a new version of them.
This essay sets forth a theoretical rationale for a critical rhetoric and presents eight “principles”; which, taken together, orient the critic toward the act of criticism. The theoretical rationale encompasses two forms of critique, styled as a critique of domination and as a critique of freedom. Both have in common an analysis of the discourse of power as it serves in the first case to maintain the privilege of the elite and, in the second, to maintain social relations across a broad spectrum of human activities. The principles articulate an orientation that sees critique as a transformative practice rather than as a method, recognizes the materiality of discourse, reconceptualizes rhetoric as doxastic as contrasted to epistemic, and as nominalistic as contrasted to universalistic, captures rhetoric as “influential"as contrasted to “causal,”; recognizes the importance of absence as well as presence, perceives the potential for polysemic as opposed to monosemic interpretation, and as an activity that is “performed.”
This study employs a Foucauldian feminist lens to analyze how organizational and gendered discourses are quite literally written upon women's bodies in ways that often constrain women's professional identities. Nineteen professional women were interviewed about their definitions and experiences of their professional bodies. The interview data are summarized in the following three emergent and telling themes: (1) a professional body is a fit body; (2) a professional body (purpose-fully) emits signs and messages through bodily comportment, nonverbal behaviours, and performances. Thus, the body is conceived as a text to be read; and, (3) a professional woman's body is positioned as excessively) sexual. The task of controlling the female body is made more difficult because the female body has a tendency to overflow. The undisciplined, excessive body points to the female body's otherness. These three themes indicate how professional women's bodies are normalized and made docile in organizational contexts. Additionally, the interview data imply that both men and women are disciplinarians. Finally, the political implications of women's embodied professional identities are discussed and future research directions are presented.
Modern Fiction Studies 41.3-4 (1995) 483-514
--C.P. Cavafy, "Ithaka"
--Lars Eighner, Travels with Lizbeth: Three Years on the Road and on the Streets
--Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues
--Anonymous transsexual woman, cited in Tully, Accounting for Transsexuality and Transhomosexuality
The figure who shapes queer theory's constructionist account of gender is the transgenderist, the subject who crosses gender boundaries in some way, whether through identification, actions, or dress. Queer theory fixes on the transgendered crossing in order to denaturalize gender, to loosen its tie from sex, gender's bodily referent. Indeed, gender-crossing elucidates sex itself as a performative, a category as constructed and unnatural as gender; as the subject crosses gender lines in spite of his/her sexed body, sex is shown to be indeterminate of gender, immaterial in both senses. Transgender thus reveals as fraudulent the accepted version of the relations between sex and gender in which sex is thought to be the natural cause of gender. The transgendered subject's role is that of a debunker, unveiling this representation of sex to be just that, a representation or simulation, not the natural cause or ground of gender at all, but its projection, in the words of Judith Butler, "gender all along" (8). In this sense, transgender has played a key part in the poststructuralist unraveling of a previous narrative of gender in which sex stands for nature and gender for culture. Such has been the canonical narrative of interdisciplinary feminist work on gender until (to use Jane Gallop's formula for periodization) around 1990, if Gender Trouble might be seen as marking this discursive shift in thinking about sex.
More interestingly, conceived through transgender, the queer understanding of gender as performative intervenes in the assumption that gendering is a narrative. The sexed body is no longer origin or starting point, the story going on to relate the acquisition of culture's gender, and becoming a man or a woman marking its ending. Queer gender undoes the linear progression of this plot, intentionally confusing causes and effects. Sex and gender appear not as distinctive and substantial characters but as evanescent, nonreferential, and overlapping codes. Most strikingly, through the transgendered subject, the very teleology of the previous story is fundamentally undermined. No longer is it said that "one is not born a woman, but rather becomes one," the surety of that becoming driving the narrative. In Butler's reformulation of de Beauvoir's famous epigram on the construction of gender nearly half a century later, not only may one never become one, even if one thinks one does, it is not clear what is meant anymore by such becoming: "There is nothing in [de Beauvoir's] account that guarantees that the 'one' who becomes a woman is necessarily female" (8). The possibility of transgender in Butler's rereading of de Beauvoir here is absolutely pivotal for it challenges the teleology of gender, the assumption that the telos of male is man, of female, woman -- the belief that gendering is a narrative with the culturally unmarked sexed body as a recognizable beginning and gendered identity as its clear-cut ending. Indeed, Butler has been canonized not for writing a narrative of cultural construction, but for deconstructing that narrative...
Examines the 1982 film "The Year of Living Dangerously" to illustrate how an explicit argument may be implicitly enacted in a rhetorical artifact through a rhetor's rhetorical choices. (MM)
A structural analysis of the racial oppositions in the television program Spenser: For Hire challenges the interpretivist media studies claim that popular culture texts are necessarily polysemic. The article argues that representations of racial difference, in particular, are not polysemic but are rather ambivalent within the structure of the racist stereotype. The character Hawk's oppositional stance and persona, though subject to contradictory critical evaluations, serve the needs of the dominant culture to depict blacks in stereotypical ways.
Current critical studies emphasize the way in which the polysemic qualities of mass mediated texts empower audiences to construct their own liberating readings. An examination of the text, audience readings, and historical placement of an episode of Cagney & Lacey concerning abortion indicates serious constraints placed on audiences by the rhetorical situations in which readings occur. The pleasures of the audience, I argue, may not be sufficient to certify a positive role for mass media in the process of social change.
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Reading transgender, rethinking women 's studies. National Wom-en's Studies Association Journal Independence day: Reinforcing patriarchal myths about gender and power
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