Worrying about Vaginas: Feminism and Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues
2007; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 32; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/499084
ISSN1545-6943
Autores Tópico(s)Gender, Security, and Conflict
ResumoPrevious articleNext article Open AccessWorrying about Vaginas: Feminism and Eve Ensler's The Vagina MonologuesChristine M. CooperChristine M. CooperWomen's Studies Research CenterBrandeis University Search for more articles by this author Women's Studies Research CenterBrandeis UniversityPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreBy now The Vagina Monologues is a worldwide phenomenon. Much more than a dramatic script, the play is a mass culture event, performed hundreds of times each year. It is also the motor behind V‐Day, an antiviolence organization with the declared mission of ending violence against women and girls, once and for all, everywhere. V‐Day's College Campaign has brought many young women into the fold, and its international efforts have expanded continually since the Worldwide Initiative began in 2001. V‐Day operates on a small scale, with performances of Eve Ensler's play benefiting local antiviolence groups in communities throughout the world, and also internationally; it sponsored the Brussels summit for Afghan women in 2002 and has created safe houses for those escaping abuse in Africa, among other endeavors. As the V‐Day edition of Ensler's script explains, "V‐Day's plan is to go global with a message that entertains and at the same time creates a visceral shift in consciousness. No one who sees the play can remain neutral to the appalling cost of ignoring the global theme of violence against women, its relationship to how we hold human rights, or to the personal cost of such violence" (Ensler 2001, 176). This essay examines the relationship between the mission of The Vagina Monologues and its aesthetic form. As a performance, the play varies with its context. But, despite its variations, because it is imbued with such purpose, the play sheds light on a particularly consumable form of feminism and activism.The Vagina Monologues is a series of first‐person narratives in which women speak about their vaginas, typically in relation to sexual experiences. Some monologues are taken nearly verbatim from interviews Ensler conducted, some are composites of many interviews, and others are playful riffs on ideas gleaned during the process of Ensler's research. Audiences encounter a wide range of voices, distinguished by age, race or ethnicity, region, economic status, and sexual orientation. Interspersed with these voices are catalogs of answers to such pithy questions as "If your vagina got dressed, what would it wear?" (Ensler 2001, 15) and "vagina facts" taken from print media.1 Although stagings of this material vary, the aim remains ostensibly the same: to foster a space in which women can, in Gloria Steinem's words, "[say] the unsayable" (Steinem 2001, xvi).2 An extension of this space, V‐Day is "based on women's ability to speak their truth about violence in a way that liberates rather than condemns, and frees both the spirit and political will" (Ensler 2001, 176). The form of The Vagina Monologues reinforces its political message and feminist ethos: we must hear each other's stories to understand each other, that understanding thus fueling anger, compassion, and a sense of shared mission to foster change for the better in our lives and the world. In its first six years (1998–2004), through benefit performances of the play and other activities, V‐Day raised over $20 million, 85 percent of which was distributed to grassroots organizations fighting violence against women in their local communities.3So what's there to worry about? More than it appears.Because the monologues share much with consciousness‐raising practices familiar to many strands of feminism that emerged during the second wave of the 1960s, critique has been slow in coming. Women coming to voice about their vaginas has the appeal of transgressing norms that have previously silenced them while offering a seeming transparency: audiences gain what appears to be direct access to voices now freed, vaginal experiences no longer shamefully hidden or denied. But monologue is a literary device with a long history in drama and poetry. Read through literary or theater history, monologues are stylized verbalizations, emphasizing "the subjective and personal element in speech" (Preminger and Brogan 1993, 799). In longer works, the single voice—mono‐logue, from the Greek by way of Middle French, for "sole speaker"—often represents a unitary point of view, whether to a frank, heartfelt, or ironic effect (or some combination thereof).4 Heard by an intended auditor or overheard voyeuristically by one unintended, monologues create "a complex semantic interplay between character and audience" (Preminger and Brogan 1993, 799). The literary quality of the personal "I" in The Vagina Monologues tends to be lost on or overlooked by viewers, even as its aesthetic appeal—the entertaining message—is what holds the promise of shifted mindsets and future feminist activity. However true to the original interviews that Ensler conducted, 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.5My worries start here. The monologue form, as it takes shape in this play and as it, in turn, shapes how audiences experience women's perceptions of their vaginas, has grave consequences for the feminist politics that the show popularizes. The "truth about violence" unleashed by V‐Day productions is far more circumscribed than it at first appears, as is the feminist praxis it calls for. To elucidate my concerns, I first consider the reified link between the vagina and female identity by comparing The Vagina Monologues to other earlier forms of popular feminism. In readings of key monologues, I then explore the political and textual effects of this reified link: an epistemological violence inscribed in the play in its representation of difference. I argue that, in both their form and their content, the monologues reduce their speakers to versions of the same, whatever the patina of diversity adorning their surface. I turn ultimately to the conditions—aesthetic and cultural—that make The Vagina Monologues possible. Each year V‐Day produces and distributes a new script to the groups participating in its College or Worldwide Campaigns. Permission to stage a V‐Day performance is contingent on following this script in its entirety, with no additions, alterations, or reordering of the monologues, even if such changes might arise from published versions of Ensler's play or previous V‐Day seasons.6 The V‐Day edition of The Vagina Monologues includes a sketch worthy of attention precisely because it is not generally staged and cannot easily be described as a monologue. The piece is telling because it demonstrates how critique is silenced, dialogue disabled, by the play's mono‐logic. I conclude with the implications of such a logic for a new or reviving feminist movement.7My encounter with The Vagina Monologues phenomenon has been many layered, each layer complicating that which came before. I first experienced the monologues at a professional performance in Northampton, MA, in 2001. Although Northampton is central to a flourishing five‐college community and has a reputation for progressive, feminist‐friendly politics, the show was neither associated with the College Campaign nor overtly a V‐Day production. Indeed, to my surprise, it had a rather apolitical character. By contrast, Ensler's special performance, aired in the United States on HBO as part of the 2002 V‐Day season and widely distributed thereafter by the network's home video division, counterbalanced my initial experience due to its overtly political antiviolence advocacy. Observations by those who have attended or participated in other productions have provided further frames through which to understand the show and the work it performs.8 The context of performances profoundly affects audience response: there is the thrill of undergraduate shows, the camaraderie of a large cast working together toward a successful opening or run, the slick professionalism of celebrity benefits, and the sheer skill of a performer like Ensler. I do not want to disregard the appeal of the play or any viewer's shift in consciousness because of it, nor do I wish to comment on the individual experiences that fed into the monologues the playwright produced.Instead, what interests and concerns me is that The Vagina Monologues phenomenon emerged when it did: at a juncture in the history of feminism when the media was rife with exposés about the death of feminism and when there was much hand‐wringing in feminist circles about the so‐called postfeminism of younger generations of women.9 Ensler's play and V‐Day have offered a media spectacle of gender politics fit to answer such alarms—a liberal, humanist feminism fashionably dressed, easy on the eyes and mind, and one that ruffles just enough but not too many feathers. My critique is, to echo Alexandra Chasin, aimed at "ideas—the ones I think harmful—and the practices that militate toward their institutionalization" (Chasin 2000, xix). The aesthetic appeal of The Vagina Monologues makes a worrisome logic palatable as feminism and jeopardizes the very changes V‐Day seeks to achieve. How we do our work as feminists has, I venture, everything to do with what that work ultimately is and means.1The V‐Day edition of the play includes five "vagina facts"; see Ensler (2001, 31, 51, 65, 67, and 91).2There are three general formats: Ensler's one‐woman show, which premiered in 1996; professional productions, such as the late‐1990s Broadway show and those that traversed the United States during 2001, where three actresses propped on stools on an otherwise bare set took turns reading the monologues; and the now standard format of College Campaign performances and celebrity benefits, where a different actress performs each monologue. The larger casts in franchised V‐Day productions have less impact on the play's message than it would seem.3These figures are from 2004. For statistics about V‐Day, see the organization's Web site at http://www.vday.org.4Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. "monologue."5Shelly Scott (2003) places Ensler's play in the context of feminist theater history but does not explicitly address the monologue form. For other recent critiques that intersect with my own, see Friedenfels (2002) and Hall (2005).6See V‐Day's guidelines for joining at http://www.vday.org/contents/vcampaigns/college/guidelines. Jo Reger and Lacey Story list an earlier set of guidelines (2005, 158).7On The Vagina Monologues' revival of the feminist movement, see especially Ivins (2001) and Dominus (2002). In 2001, Karen Obel, director of the V‐Day College Initiative (as the College Campaign was then known), described the project as bringing "a new generation to a new kind of feminism" (Ensler 2001, 142).8The HBO production is different from a stage show in that interviews are interspersed with Ensler's performance of the monologues, creating a more complex piece because it lets select subjects "speak their truth" more directly. For descriptions of other shows, see the College Campaign testimonials (Ensler 2001, 133–71); see also Scott (2003), Reger and Story (2005), and the myriad reviews available in print media.9See the infamous Newsweek (Ebeling 1990) and Time (Bellafante 1998) articles, the latter of which discusses a celebrity benefit of The Vagina Monologues, as well as Baumgardner and Richards (2000, chap. 3). Many third‐wave feminists, such as Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, have felt it necessary to explicate their ties to earlier movements, describing their struggles to move feminism in new directions without betraying a past that has empowered them. See also Walker (1995); Labaton and Martin (2004).My vagina, my selfEnsler opens the monologues with a teasing, double‐edged remark: "I bet you're worried" (Ensler 2001, 3). For audiences, the assertion plays as much on the anxiety aroused by attending the show as on the concern about vaginas Ensler wishes to instill. When the piece premiered, the title alone raised eyebrows, but by now, given its nearly mainstream status, attendees know, if nothing else, that "cunt" will be yelled fervently during the evening, with audience participation expected. Viewers of the HBO production audibly snickered at Ensler's opening line, and she built on the expected response to draw them in further. "I was worried," the monologue continues, "that's why I began this piece. … I was worried about what we think about vaginas, and even more worried that we don't think about them. I was worried about my own vagina. It needed a context of other vaginas—a community, a culture of vaginas" (Ensler 2001, 3).10 For the duration of a show, the audience becomes that community. Its worry about being there turns into a reason for being there, which matches Ensler's motivations for creating the work in the first place. This community, the product of ticket purchases, augments the one already present within the monologues. The more than two hundred women Ensler interviewed, a spectrum of whom became the basis for the play's speaking subjects, constitute a culture that does think and talk unabashedly about so‐called private parts. Although this culture is idealized because it has been aestheticized by the playwright, it nevertheless offers the audience a collectivity of sorts to join.11 The voices of the many are there within the scripted movements of the ones on stage. There is, the monologues assure us, safety in numbers.My worries as I awaited that first curtain's rise were less about vaginas per se than about the ellipses effected by the idea of this body part made eloquent. For Ensler, the vagina monologues are "both concrete images and metaphors for life and change" (Gibson 2002, 17). She thinks that "taking 'the V‐word' out of the closet" might release people "to deal with other secrets—like violence and rape, fear, and death" (17). The subjectivized vagina is such a powerful—indeed, seductive—trope, however, that it risks collapsing the metaphor. Two distinct, equally important, and problematic elisions occur in the show: the vagina stands primarily as a sign of sexuality, and sexuality is made the very core of women's identities. Rather than a metaphor, which reveals difference as much as resemblance between two ideas, the vagina becomes a metonym—a part of the body and a particular subset of experience standing in for the whole of female consciousness.12 Through metaphor, as Ensler names it, or metonym, as I do, the trope of the vagina is so easily naturalized (or accepted as natural) that it, ironically, loses its figurative status, cultivating a literal equivalence in the play. One's vagina is necessarily one's female self.13 A woman who attended a "vagina workshop" (Ensler 2001, 43) hoping to find her clitoris speaks of not having "to find it" but having to "be it" (49): "It was me, the essence of me" (49). In a later monologue the playwright expresses the need for women "to be present in our vaginas, to speak of them out loud, to speak of their hunger and pain and loneliness and humor, to make them visible so they cannot be ravaged in the dark without great consequence" (Ensler 2001, 118). Like the "culture of vaginas" (3) desired at the beginning of the show, women—as the agents of their experience and the lexical subjects of Ensler's sentences—are replaced by, or subsumed within, their fully emotive body parts. At the opening, Ensler's worry about her vagina turned to its need for a community, just as here our need to be present in our vaginas turns to their hunger and pain. Women become conduits for their vaginas' truth and sanctity. "Our center, our point, our motor, our dream" (Ensler 2001, 118), vaginas serve as the crux of women's lives, their purpose or motivation ("our point" seems especially ambiguous), their now as well as their future.For me, this went down rather uneasily, however heartily I may have laughed at moments during the performance. As a student of early modern feminism, the precursors of the modern first wave, I cannot see a celebratory liberation of vaginas—the word or the women for whom they stand—without reservations. Watching the show, I did not feel my "deep essential sel[f]" (Nakao 2004, E1) release within me; instead, I worried about the ideas of an essential self that Ensler wanted to "go into the bodies" of her audience (E1).Binding subjectivity to the body, especially via sexuality, has been decidedly double edged for women, fostering ontological definitions of female nature used against them in various historical moments and cultural contexts, as well as oppositional reclamations of such nature used on their behalf by certain schools of feminism. To an extent, we know this story. Women were known as "the sex" for centuries in the West, delimited by, and thus reduced to, their bodies, which provided justification for their subordination in society.14 The notion persists today, though it may go by different names or simmer nameless beneath the surface, the doxa of everyday experience.15 The Vagina Monologues' collapsing of self and vagina, however energizing and entertaining the gesture, carries the ideological baggage of this essentialist history. Reversing a binary, privileging what was previously denigrated, does not free us from its epistemological underpinnings.16 The play's limited view of the history of feminism, moreover, precludes a critical perspective that could retool its more dangerous associations.While Ensler recognizes feminist precursors occasionally in the play, her perspective is short‐ranged. In the "Acknowledgements" section of the V‐Day edition, she thanks Gloria Steinem "for being there before" her (Ensler 2001, 180), and in the opening remarks to "The Flood," a monologue representing the sixty‐five‐to‐seventy‐five‐year‐old women she interviewed, Ensler expresses how "terribly lucky [she felt] to have grown up in the feminist era" (23), for these women, unlike herself, had "very little conscious relationship" to their bodies (23). The playwright's "feminist era" is unequivocally second wave. Empowerment through the flesh, particularly sexuality's status as a unique indicator of women's autonomy, places The Vagina Monologues in line with a certain outgrowth of this diverse (and sometimes fractious) era. Reformist and cultural, this brand of feminism moved, in the early 1970s, away from social transformation—economic and racial as well as antipatriarchal—to embrace "a cult of the individual 'liberated woman'" (Willis 1984, 93). Privileging the oppression of women as women above all else, it focused on changing their lived experience, but it used liberal strategies of "individual and collective self‐improvement" (Willis 1984, 108) that proved exclusionary and problematic for many feminists active in the movement before then and that continue to plague many invested in gender politics.17 Ensler's eloquent vaginas are consistent with this liberal feminism's speaking out about issues once considered taboo, such as orgasm or abortion; its claiming of women's power to do with their persons as they wish; and, most important, its particular slant on the politics of private experience, where "self‐discovery and personal transformation" constitute "revolutionary activity" in their own right (Fuss 1989, 101).18 Reclaiming the vagina, one's own or the idea, does not erase or empty of meaning the historical conditions that have made corporeality a liability for women. For that, we must look elsewhere—farther afield.Because of my training, my instinct is to go directly to the eighteenth century and Mary Wollstonecraft. But first I turn briefly to Simone de Beauvoir, a mid‐twentieth‐century feminist with a philosophical disposition akin to Wollstonecraft's. Although many had questioned how natural societal definitions of female nature were before she did, Beauvoir's renowned Le Deuxième Sexe made it axiomatic that "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman" (Beauvoir [1949] 1970, 249). Beauvoir wrote from the viewpoint of academic existentialism, and her book sought more "to explain than to reform" women's situation (Parshley 1970, v). Her explanation nevertheless made clear for many in the West how societal expectations, gendered practices of education, and the force of tradition created ideas of woman's nature—that is, her essential otherness to masculine normativity. Contending with assumptions about female sexuality and maternal instinct, Beauvoir rejected predominant views of "the sex" as biologically determined.19 Her book was hailed as the "first manifesto of the liberated woman."20 Placing responsibility on acculturation rather than bodily nature, she validated the efforts of those who sought to alter processes of socialization and facilitate the advancement of women. By either account, womanhood would remain a construction, a product of the situations in which actual women lived. The body was itself but a situation for Beauvoir ([1949] 1970, 30), a physicality understood and thus experienced through a conceptual framework particular to the culture within which it appeared. There was no "eternal feminine," no necessary or intrinsic quality, no "mysterious essence" (672) to women's being. Beauvoir left indeterminate what the "free woman" would become: independent (socially, economically, morally) and "permitted to take her chances in her own interest and in the interest of all," to be sure, but whether qualified in any way by gender difference, "this would be to hazard bold predictions" she refused to make (Beauvoir [1949] 1970, 673).Beauvoir's arguments echo a critique offered by Wollstonecraft nearly a century and a half earlier. That it was necessary to highlight yet again the culturally determined rather than innate bases of women's subordination tells us much about the resiliency of assumptions about "the sex"—and they are with us still. Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792, took a masculinist culture to task for miseducating women, for treating them as the "weaker vessel" and then blaming them for that weakness (Wollstonecraft [1792] 1993, 78). For Wollstonecraft, woman's nature was as yet unknown because it had not been tested free of society's corruptions; prejudice and custom precluded detection of whether "the sex" had indeed "less mind than man" (92). Unlike Beauvoir, Wollstonecraft was invested in reform. Writing at a time when democracy and citizenship were hotly debated, she speculated what women might be and accomplish should their life training proceed differently. It is largely through this vision that she has come down to us as the founder or "foremother" of Western feminism (Yeo 1997, 1).To put women's rights (and, of course, her own) on the table for consideration, Wollstonecraft regarded women as "human creatures" rather than "females," attempting thereby to circumvent the problem of femininity (Wollstonecraft [1792] 1993, 75). Sexuality rather than motherhood was her sticking point, since eighteenth‐century female subjectivity was defined largely in terms of a sensibility and lasciviousness that threatened to escape control.21 According to Jean‐Jacques Rousseau's Emile, an enormously influential book on education that Wollstonecraft countered, "the life of a good woman is a perpetual struggle against self" (Rousseau [1762] 1974, 332). This self is, for Wollstonecraft, an ideological weapon of patriarchy. Women are not frivolous, tending toward debauchery, or unfaithful but reasoning beings shaped by an environment that compels them to act in debasing ways. Society renders them objects of desire and subjects—individual selves—only to the degree that they participate in their own objectification. Wollstonecraft offered an alternative education that would exercise women's minds as well as their bodies and an idea of equal rights contingent upon rejecting the cultural apparatus of eroticized womanhood. In practice, this approach meant abnegation of women's passions. Yet woman, traditionally feminized or not, remains something one becomes rather than something one is in the Vindication, as is the case in Beauvoir's Second Sex. The process of socialization Wollstonecraft offered was counterhegemonic, but it was no mere return to nature, for she knew from Rousseau's failings that arguing difference from nature was ultimately reactionary (Kaplan 1986, 54). If her formula for women's independent subjectivity proved unlivable (as it did), it was not because "an immanent and irrepressible sexuality broke through levels of female self‐denial" but rather because her "anti‐erotic ethic … foregrounded and constructed a sexualized subject" (Kaplan 1986, 50). "The sex" remained trapped by ideas of sex despite Wollstonecraft's desire for liberation.22To the extent that feminism continues to argue its case through an immanent and irrepressible sexuality, a sexuality that society imprisons or disparages but that feminism seeks to free—as Ensler's play does—women's identities remain bound to the bodies with which they are born. Although those bodies may look different and may experience desire and satisfaction differently, a totalizing view of sexuality underpins the argument for their liberation as versions of an essential same. Who counts as a woman may seem broadened in The Vagina Monologues, but what makes one a woman remains fixed: the vagina, which carries metaphysical significations. As a result, Ensler's new or reviving feminism can mistake itself as a bearer of truth, a female subjectivity that stands outside history and beyond the social, when it is but another means through which women become who they are or want to be. Feminism, like womanhood, desire, or even agency, is a social construct: it "cannot be understood apart from the very particular contexts within which it occurs and does not exist outside those contexts" (Scott 1990, 851). Adopting Cora Kaplan's words, the "feminist revolution" Ensler and V‐Day promise is but "a new social relation, with"—we must concede—"new contradictions and constraints" (Kaplan 1986, 55).Ensler's essentialism dissuades consideration of contradictions and constraints—in the play, its monologic vagina‐selves, or its antiviolence mission. Just as the playwright was "possessed" (Ensler 2001, xxiv) by The Vagina Monologues, women appear to be freed simply by speaking of their vaginas or listening to the performance of such speech.23 Feminism acts here as a force of nature, enabling these events while shrouding them nonetheless in mystique. At the close of the vagina workshop monologue, the speaker calls her vagina "a destiny" (Ensler 2001, 50). She says, "I am arriving as I am beginning to leave," and she remains suspended in the equation of "my vagina, my vagina, me" (50). In the sketch that is not generally staged, one that poses criticism of Ensler's project, the playwright interjects a question about whether "talking about vaginas ruin[s] the[ir] mystery"; "or is that," she continues, "just another myth that keeps vaginas in the dark, keeps them unknowing and unsatisfied?" (117). The play is deeply invested in that darkness and mystery, affirming it and dispelling it by turns, but naturalizing it all the while.In its devotion to women reclaiming their genuine a priori vagina‐selves, The Vagina Monologues phenomenon ironically relinquishes its power "to expand the cultural field bodily through subversive performances of various kinds" (Butler 1990, 282). "Gender is not," as Judith Butler argues, "passively scripted on the body, and neither is it determined by nature, language, the symbolic, or the overwhelming history of patriarchy. Gender is what is put on, invariably, under constraint, daily and incessantly, with anxiety and pleasure, but if this continuous act is mistaken for a natural or linguistic given" (Butler 1990, 282)—as it is in Ensler's play—the possibility of change itself is compromised, and new versions of old norms instituted. Collapsing vagina and self, the monologues reify a universal ontology of womanhood, a newly normative, potentially disciplinary version of "the sex."24 They enact subversion that, in the end, subverts little because the play sees itself as an access point to unique versions of a larger, unquestionable real. To the extent that it co‐opts the credibility of feminist consciousness‐raising, it can also be mistaken by audiences as not an act in any sense at all.10Typographical devices frequently mark emphasis in Ensler's script. Unless otherwise noted, all emphases are original.11The gendered nature of this collectivity raises questions about the vaginaless in the audience. Kim Q. Hall (2005) addresses how problematic the play is for intersexed individuals, and Scott (2003) speaks of a performance in which men were referred to as the "vagina curious" (408) and accepted into the community. The epistemological foundations of the monologues accommodate men much more easily than the intersexed, as Hall elucidates, and I will further.12See Preminger and Brogan (1993, s.v.v. "metaphor" and "metonymy"). The 1980s saw much debate in feminist theory about the gendering of figurative language. Metaphor was deemed phallogocentric because it appropriated the other in its quest for similitude between two terms. Metonym, especially via the work of Luce Irigaray, was considered feminine and fluid, a strategic essentialism built on women's "two lips" that deconstructed the unitary phallic worldview. For a summary of these debates, see Fuss (1989); for a cautionary view of their limitations, see Johnson (1984). Productive as they were in their time, I find
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