No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Worrying about Vaginas: Feminism and Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues
... 282). Foucault insists that an individual As Catherine Cooper (2007) ...
... Here the speaking of the unspeakable is claimed as the path toward liberation; the idea behind the play is that we-in this instance, the global community-do not talk enough about vaginas and that public declarations about so-called female genitalia will liberate women. Christine Cooper (2007), in one of few scholarly sources located that critically examine the Monologes, states, "the monologues convert conversations-questions and answers between two women-into the personal, at times confessional, speech of a solitary female subject who sees herself through, if not as, her vagina" (p. 729). ...
... The reality of a shared experience of female genitalia is thus reinscribed as natural and indeed the main determinant for participants. These prescriptions serve to naturalize the truth of genitalia, and as Cooper (2007) notes, by "[c]ollapsing vagina and self, the monologues reify a universal ontology of womanhood, a newly normative, potentially disciplinary version of 'the sex'" (p. 738). ...
... Based on Ensler's interviews with about two hundred women, she created monologues, some taken verbatim and others shaped by her artistic rendering of the testimonies (Ensler 2001, 7). The performance involves a range of voices that Ensler believed would represent women varying in age, race, ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation (Cooper 2007), though the limitations of this representation would be one point of strong contention among her critics, as discussed below. ...
... Positive reception to The Vagina Monologues therefore praises the play's effects on challenging taboos surrounding women's sexuality and pleasure, facilitating consciousness-raising and collective solidarity, exploring womandefined forms of pleasure, challenging violence against women, and providing new ways to conceptualize the beauty and what some consider the "sacrality" of women's sexuality (Cooper 2007). ...
... This performance, which though varies with its context, sheds more light on a particularly consumable form of feminism and activism. Cooper (2007) states that the Vagina Monologue is a worldwide phenomenon. The symbolic use of the genital organ continues to be used as a form of defiance and resistance. ...
Election crises have derailed democratic propensities in developing countries including Nigeria. One of the consequences of electoral crises is its attendant effect on the vulnerable population particularly children and women who are usually the most affected. The article examines how these women deployed non-violent means of undressing as a weapon of social resistance against violence and malpractices during the gubernatorial elections in Rivers State-an oil rich area in the Niger Delta region in Nigeria in March/April 2019. The methodology adopted is qualitative. This article heavily relies on secondary data. This includes extant and relevant literature, newspaper and verified video clips. The article is anchored around the frustration-aggression and the J Curve theories. The article finds that while women resistance movement through the unconventional method of nudity or display of nakedness may pose some serious ideological concerns in certain quarters and violent responses from state and non-state actors, its success in thwarting electoral malpractices at the Okirika and Ogu/ Bolo areas during the gubernatorial elections of Rivers State is worth emulation. The article recommends that since the deployment of nakedness as a form of non-violent means has been effective like in the cases of Okirika and Ogu/ Bolo areas of Rivers State, it should be complemented with sustainable efforts from the civil society organisations, international community and stakeholders, as well as the embracing of good governance from the ruling elite.
... These and many other charges represent a force of resistance which also exists in China (cf. Bell & Reverby, 2005;Cooper, 2007;Hall, 2005;Yu, 2015). Thus, it is essential for the translators to convey the communicative purpose of the play to both performers and audiences; i.e. feminism in TVM should be underscored to avoid a misunderstanding of TVM in order to achieve the feminist purpose in China. ...
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.
... By 2004, the play was circulating in cities and college towns across the globe, promoted simultaneously as a response to violence against women and a celebration of female sexuality. The Monologues has also been criticized in the past, largely on its global sisterhood approach (Cooper, 2007) and attention to sexual violence (McElroy, 2000). Based on over 200 interviews with adult women about their memories and experiences of sexuality, the play mainly addresses societal constructions of the female body, and includes references to gender-based violence. ...
In 2004, Ashbourne High School1 staged the first school-sponsored student performance of The Vagina Monologues, sparking a community controversy covered in the local and national media about the sexuality of minors. Through a content analysis of archival documents and media coverage, this study examines the discursive politics of this community debate over sex, youth, and schools. The author finds that underlying this community’s abundant and atypical support for sexual speech in school was a pervasive gendered discourse of sexual risk, one that transposed teen talk about sex into culturally defensible, protective social action.
During the Bosnian War (1992–1995), mass rapes were used as an instrument of ethnic cleansing and received extensive local and transnational media coverage. The paper examines transnational feminist art interventions that strive to give voice to rape survivors and to contest the dominant local and international media representations of women victims of violence, namely Šejla Kamerić’s poster and art installation Bosnian Girl, Eve Ensler’s play Necessary Targets, and Jasmila Žbanić’s fiction films Grbavica and For Those Who Can Tell No Tales. These interventions touch upon a variety of ethical issues, such as the power imbalances between Western and local actors, the risk of reproducing discursive victimization and ethnic essentialism, and the contested interpretations of rape as an instrument of genocide or as an expression of universal patriarchy.
Marriage was historically not only a romantic ideal, but a tool of exploitation of women in many regards. Women were often considered commodities and marriage was far away from the romantic stereotypes people relate to it today. While marriages served as diplomatic tools or means of political legitimization in the past, the discourses about marital relationships changed and women expressed their demands more openly. Discourses about marriage in history and literature naturally became more and more heated, especially during the "long" 19th century, when marriages were contested by social reformers or political radicals, male and female alike. The present volume provides a discussion of the role of marriage and the discourses about in different chronological and geographical contexts and shows which arguments played an important role for the demand for more equality in martial relationships. It focuses on marriage discourses, may they have been legal or rather socio-political ones. In addition, the disputes about marriage in literary works of the 19th and 20th centuries are presented to complement the historical debates.
The silence around female genitalia and sexuality is a prevalent phenomenon with grave implications. Eve Ensler, an American playwright, wrote the famous Vagina Monologues to combat such issues and aim to end violence against women. While Ensler’s play is popular on a global scale, the localized versions inspired by Ensler are also emerging in various regions. A Chinese feminist organization, The Vagina Project, has created their own script and organized several localized performances in the past few years. A close analysis of one of the scripts written by the Vagina Project demonstrates that the localized versions of The Vagina Monologues, though less paid attention to, are effective in creating connections with the audience. Being attuned to the regional feminist differences allows the play to be more powerful and thoughtful when presented to the audience.
In the context of a new wave of women’s activism for equality, the body is once again at the centre of the discussion today, in the USA and globally. Analysing American discourses about health and illness at the turn of the century, Tasha Dubriwny (2013) has argued that the current narratives are dominated by neoliberal and postfeminist philosophies that have thrived in a framework of biomedicalisation and self-surveillance. What happens, then, when a successful feminist artist is diagnosed with uterine cancer? How does Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues and founder of V-Day, face the fact that her life may have a painful ending? How does a woman so aware of her physical and psychological self come to terms with illness? Is she willing to put her political project aside to become a patient?Through a close reading ofEnsler’s uterine cancer memoir In the Body of the World (2013), and focusing particularly on its structure and narrative strategies, this paper situates her work within the corpus of female literature about health and illness in the twenty-first century, exploring her meaning-making process in the light of the current tensions between feminism and postfeminism.
The Vagina Monologues, the world-famous feminist play, was introduced to China in 2003 and has been recreated and performed many times by young feminist activists with respect to Chinese women’s issues over the past 20 years. By demonstrating the special experiences and examples of different Chinese versions and performances of The Vagina Monologues in the 2010s, this article is an attempt to explore the indigenization process of the play in the Chinese context. First, it looks at its experimental performance for rural people in the village of Zhuhai; then it focuses on the emerging participation by several troupes of LGBT groups and other gender minorities; and last, it illustrates the social influence of ‘The Vagina Event’ online and feminist street action outside theaters and campuses. The article thereby argues that the performance of different local versions of The Vagina Monologues can be regarded as important in feminist activism in contemporary China.
http://unitec.researchbank.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10652/3579/NTLT%20Proceedings.pdf?sequence=1
Relay translation is generally understood as the translation of a translated text, spoken or written, into a third language (St. André 2009, 230). It has been widely used in intercultural exchange in history. However, due to worries about greater distortion of or deviation from the ultimate source text, there has been widespread aversion to its practice. This partly explains why “very few dispassionate studies” on it have been carried out (Washbourne 2013, 609). Moreover, the existing studies pay more attention to problems in relay translation and tend to be very restrictive in defining the concept, either wittingly or unwittingly, excluding intralingual and intersemiotic translation. This paper investigates an intralingual case of relay translation through examining the Chinese productions at Fudan University of the radical feminist play The Vagina Monologues (Ensler 1998). However, this paper is not so much about relay translation as it is commonly understood. It explores the translation of a translated text into different translations of the text in the source language, focusing on the translators’ behavior in the specific social context, particularly the strategies for dealing with the constraints from the social context and cultural differences. The constraints resulted in remarkable manipulations in the Fudan productions for more effective communication with the audience and for better reception in the target context. The manipulations discussed under the rubric of relevance will demonstrate both differences and interconnections among the Fudan productions, the mediating texts, and the source text, revealing the complexity of translating Western feminism in China as well as the complexity of relay translation.
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.
In this introductory chapter, we discuss who are girls of color and how have girls of color and their sexuality been framed in various related fields. We also situate our work in current contexts, briefly reviewing the context of hypersexualization of girls. We introduce the chapters to come and we discuss our positions in terms of our own racial identities and histories with respect to the writing of this book, the interviewing of the girls of color, and the teaching of the sex education classes.
In this article we intend to analyze theatre as a privileged (yet problematic) site to denounce how women's bodies have been traditionally dissected and objectified under patriarchal scrutiny. To achieve this purpose we explore the controversial staging of the feminine body within feminist practice and concentrate on a study of three plays by contemporary American female playwrights so as to determine the performative aesthetics allowing for the dismantling of such traditional essentialist gaze. Our analysis of Suzan Lori-Parks's Venus (1996), Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues (1996), and Lynn Nottage's Ruined (2007) demonstrates how the feminist discourse aiming to destabilize normative notions of femininity may result in a misleading representation of female corporealities that, paradoxically enough, might accentuate those hegemonic notions that were originally intended to be dismantled. We support our study with the analysis of the strategies these authors resort to in their endeavor to revise traditional meanings associated to women's anatomies and to defy dominant constructions of femininity. On that account, we identify the risks and difficulties that the (mis)representation of women's embodied experiences from a feminist perspective may bring about.
Judy Chicago's monumental art installation The Dinner Party was an immediate sensation when it debuted in 1979, and today it is considered the most popular work of art to emerge from the second-wave feminist movement. Jane F. Gerhard examines the piece's popularity to understand how ideas about feminism migrated from activist and intellectual circles into the American mainstream in the last three decades of the twentieth century. More than most social movements, feminism was transmitted and understood through culture-art installations, Ms. Magazine, All in the Family, and thousands of other cultural artifacts. But the phenomenon of cultural feminism came under extraordinary criticism in the late 1970s and 1980s Gerhard analyzes these divisions over whether cultural feminism was sufficiently activist in light of the shifting line separating liberalism from radicalism in post-1970s America. She concludes with a chapter on the 1990s, when The Dinner Partyemerged as a target in political struggles over public funding for the arts, even as academic feminists denounced the piece for its alleged essentialism. The path that The Dinner Party traveled-from inception (1973) to completion (1979) to tour (1979-1989) to the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Museum (2007)-sheds light on the history of American feminism since 1970 and on the ways popular feminism in particular can illuminate important trends and transformations in the broader culture. © 2013 by the University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved.
In recent years, a growing group of scholars has begun to draw upon queer theory as they research aspects of LGBTQ folk performances and texts from around the globe. In the process, folklore scholars have become increasingly intrigued by bodies that appear to transgress dimorphism, and complicate binary oppositions like male/female. Performances of gender identity and sexuality by hijras in South Asia have awakened audiences' imaginings since the Kama Sutra period (Gupta 2005:180). In folktale, dance, song, religious epic, and popular culture, the figure of the hijra often evokes a liminal play of "otherness." Commonly known as the "third gender"-a conceptual space outside of typical Western constructs-hijra individuals engage with varied notions of transsexual, transgender, intersex, cross-dresser, eunuch, or sexual fluidity. This article focuses on a feminist appropriation of the hijra within Yoni Ki Baat, a South Asian American feminist theater performance inspired by The Vagina Monologues. The authors explore how the figure of the hijra-drawn from South Asian folk narratives, religious discourse, and popular culture-might be used strategically by social activists in political performance narratives to (1) encourage a complicated sense of sexually ambiguous or queer practices and identities, and (2) acknowledge individuals facing social oppression due to their marginalized identities. As such, their approach conceptualizes performance as both a relational space and as a space in which to wonder about questions of relationality (Madison and Hamera 2006; Schechner 1990).
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
According to Gilbert and Thompkins (1996: 5), postcolonial drama is aimed at dismantling the hierarchies and determinants that create binary oppositions in postcolonial contexts and – according to Young (2001: 4) – also actively transforming the present “out of the clutches of the past”. This dismantling can, however, only occur when the inevitable ambivalence of postcolonial binaries are taken into account (Gilbert & Thompkins 1996: 6). In her text The Free State (2000a), Janet Suzman attempts to appropriate Chekhov's dismantling of power structures in The Cherry Orchard (1904) within the South African context. However, although The Free State is written against the former apartheid regime, it fails to dismantle the hierarchies within its context because it negates the vital carnivalesque subversion of Chekhov's text. Instead of subverting the hierarchies in her context, Suzman merely inverts them. In this article, the concept of the carnival as developed by Mikhail Bakhtin is used to investigate the significance of Suzman's deviation in the treatment of the hierarchies within the South African context.
This article analyses the sexual innuendos, the ‘irreverent’ postures and the sex talk which marked a number of ethnographic encounters with women in north India. While these encounters discursively harassed the anthropologist’s interpretive categories, Indian women’s ‘excess of agency’ established a joking intimacy with her. Where encounters radically subverted aspects of the representational history of women across colonial and postcolonial India, their novel representational possibilities opened up new ones for those women writing on them. Finally, encounters signalled the urgent need for research in the largely unknown terrain of heterosexuality in India, and this research’s potential to rethink the semantics of gender.
Drawing on the author's experience in devising a localized version of The Vagina Monologues in Hong Kong, this paper critically appraises the ‘global vaginahood’ in the globalization of The Vagina Monologues and the V-Day movement that reproduces a core-periphery relationship in the transnational women's movement. As a theatrical performance and a worldwide movement, these productions are remarkable for the manner in which they raise awareness about women's sexuality and violence against women in different parts of the world. Critical questions, however, remain on the rhetoric of universalism and the ethnocentric methods of the global campaign, with US women's experiences and agenda defining those of women in other parts of the world. As a worldwide campaign, the V-Day movement reproduces a hierarchical model between the global North and South, with an emphasis on Western leadership rather than coalition between partners with different experiences, priorities, and strategies. The paper argues that feminists may develop more effective coalitions with local women by recognizing and identifying locally derived creative efforts to respond to issues that are pertinent to their lives. As such, the paper is a push for dialogues in the V-Day campaign and transnational women's movement in general.Feminist Review (2009) 92, 19–35. doi:10.1057/fr.2009.3
In her foreword to the "V-Day Edition" of Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues, Gloria Steinem writes of her initial reaction to seeing Ensler's performance: "I already know this: it's the journey of truth telling we've been on for the past three decades". I shared that reaction as a spectator of the monologues, performed as part of the V-Day College Campaign on university campuses for the past three years, and when I sat in a US$55 seat to watch a professional production in Chicago in 2001. The four performances had only the text in common, but audience reactions were very much the same. The standing ovations, the whistles and yells, and the jubilant atmospheres left me wondering about this newly discovered need to jointly celebrate womanhood. What may initially appear as old-fashioned and redundant to those familiar with feminism's theatrical history in the U.S. strikes many in the general publicas outrageous and innovative, and they can't get enough. Why is such a need still present in these postfeminist days? and What does it signify that the need is being met through theatre (another old-fashioned notion for some)? If, indeed, The Vagina Monologues is merely echoing what early feminist consciousness- raising groups were teaching in the seventies, why has it now become a political sensation unparalleled in American feminist theatre?
AT THE FOOT OF THE MOUNTAIN is a women's theater collective. We are committed to honoring women's feelings and nurturing women's values as the source of health for our planet. We create and produce plays, community events, and rituals by, about, and for women. As a full-time professional company, we are experienced and trained performers, playwrights, directors, teachers and administrators. Collectively, we are as committed to understanding the magic of the theater as we are to understanding the necessity of human liberation. As witnesses to the destructiveness of a society which is alienated from itself, we are a theater of protest. As participants in the prophecy of a new world which is emerging through the rebirth of women's consciousness, we are a theater of celebration.
This paper questions the connection between vaginas and feminist embodiment in The Vagina Monologues and considers how the text both challenges and reinscribes (albeit unintentionally) systems of patriarchy, compulsory heterosexuality, and ableism. I use the Intersex Society of North America's critique as a point of departure and argue that the text offers theorists and activists in feminist, queer, and disability communities an opportunity to understand how power operates in both dominant discourses that degrade vaginas and strategies of feminist resistance that seek to reclaim and celebrate them.
Drawing parallels between gender essentialism and cultural essentialism, I point to some common features of essentialist pictures of culture. 1 argue that cultural essentialism is detrimental to feminist agendas and suggest strategies for its avoidance, Contending that some forms of cultural relativism buy into essentialist notions of culture, I argue that postcolonial feminists need to be cautious about essentialist contrasts between “Western” and “Third World” cultures.
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, 1995.
Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and Literature
- Dorothy Allison
The Failure of Feminism
- Kay Ebeling
Structures, Habitus, Power: Basis for a Theory of Symbolic Power.” In Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory
- Pierre Bourdieu
Eve Ensler Wants to Save the World
- Susan Dominus
Wild Nights: Pleasure/Sexuality/Feminism
- Cora Kaplan
Translator’s preface
- H M Parshley
Mary Wollstonecraft and 200 Years of Feminisms. London: Rivers Oram
- Eileen Yeo
- Janes
Monologues for the Future.” Indiana Daily Student
- Jane Charney