Feminism
Vagina Dialogues

Vagina Dialogues

Students at Mt. Holyoke College are protesting the annual performance of Eve Ensler’s feminist classic, The Vagina Monologues. Their gripe with the play is that by focusing on vaginas, the play perpetuates “vagina essentialism,” suggesting that ALL women have vaginas and that ALL people with vaginas are women. Transgender and intersex people have taught us that this seemingly simple “truth” is actually not true. There are women who have penises and there are men who have vaginas. Not to mention women born without vaginas! Hence, these Mt. Holyoke critics imply, the play contributes to the erasure of difference by presenting a “narrow perspective on what it means to be a woman,” and shouldn’t be produced on college campuses.

Vagina Monologues cover

Let’s keep in mind that Ensler would have had to be psychic to anticipate the explosion in trans and intersex awareness when the play premiered in 1996. And in 2005 she did add a monologue based on an all trans version of the play (Beautiful Daughters) that can be integrated into the rest. Even without that addition, I think the play has its own merits; omission is not necessarily the same as discrimination, as Professor Suzanna Walters has astutely explained in a recent open letter to Mt. Holyoke.

It’s possible, of course, that the gender fluidity we enjoy today has rendered The Vagina Monologues obsolete. But I don’t think so. I believe that the play is, unfortunately, just as relevant for young women today as it was twenty years ago when it was first performed. Let’s be honest: not only do most women have vaginas, but many have complicated relationships with this part of their bodies. When Eve Ensler first wrote the play, women (even on college campuses) weren’t accustomed to mentioning their vaginas in public, much less screaming or weeping about them on stage. The play broke barriers in this regard and has helped countless women who have acted in or seen the play come to terms with their difficult pasts, which have often included abusive relationships, rape, or even just an inability to explore what they can’t even name and so must call: “down there.”

Performance of The Vagina Monologues at the American Conservatory Theater in 2010. (Timothy Faust/Flickr CC BY-NC-SA)
Performance of The Vagina Monologues at the American Conservatory Theater in 2010. (Timothy Faust/Flickr CC BY-NC-SA)

I know from teaching Women’s and Gender Studies to college students for the last twenty-five years that women still have negative experiences that affect how they experience their bodies and their sexuality. Eve Ensler agrees. In a Guardian interview she said, “I would like to believe that the play is outdated and irrelevant but sadly it isn’t. . . I travel the planet, I’ve just come from many countries and the United States where 51% of the population has vaginas and aren’t able to have agency over those vaginas. We know that one out of every three women will be raped or beaten in her lifetime – so we know we have a long way to go before vaginas are liberated.” The play gives many women (not all) permission to identify with the readers of the monologues, to see themselves, and perhaps to begin to heal. And it catalyzes young feminists, inspiring them to work for gender justice and against violence in their own lives and in the world — no easy feat, but that’s the power of theater and personal stories.

Transmen who may have vaginas, or transwomen who either have vaginas or who may want them, and women born with Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser (MRKH) Syndrome, one of many conditions that involves the absence of a vagina and other female reproductive anatomy, might also be able to appreciate complicated feelings about their bodies, even if the play doesn’t depict their exact situations. In fact, given the societal pressure to be “normal,” it’s hard to imagine too many people completely “at home” with their bodies. Why not encourage people to celebrate their bodies in all their forms, or at least try to recognize and overcome their oppressive pasts, even if we all don’t share that particular celebration or oppression?

Slogan of The Interface Project, an intersex activist organization.
Slogan of The Interface Project, an intersex activist organization.

Intersex activists have coined the insightful slogan, “No Body is Shameful®,” to draw attention to the shaming and forced cosmetic adherence to the idea of a “normal” body. Of course, here they are talking about people born with atypical sex development, like the one in 5000 infant girls born with MRKH Syndrome. Since the nineteenth century, girls born without vaginas have endured the surgical creation of such anatomy. This reconstructive “corrective” surgery, described eloquently here by Esther Morris Leidolf, in a narrative she calls the “The Missing Vagina Monologue,” has never been done for the pleasure of the girl, but as her physician bluntly explained when she was only thirteen years old: so that she “could have a normal sex life with her husband.”

This is the kind of violence that The Vagina Monologues speaks to, even though there are no intersex characters in Eve Ensler’s play. It doesn’t matter (though it would be a good idea!). Watching the play encourages us to appreciate the profound refrain, “No Body is Shameful,” whether we have a vagina, want a vagina, like vaginas, or just love hearing the word spoken rebelliously and repeatedly on stage.


Further Reading

Susan E. Bell and Susan M. Reverby, “Vaginal Politics: Tensions and Possibilities in The Vagina Monologues,” Women’s Studies International Forum 28 (2005), 430-444.

Feature image: (Matt Kowal/Flickr CC BY-SA)

Elizabeth Reis is a professor of gender and bioethics at the Macaulay Honors College at the City University of New York. She is the author of Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex, which was recently published in a 2nd edition, and Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England. She is also the editor of American Sexual Histories: A Social and Cultural History Reader.

6 thoughts on “Vagina Dialogues

    • Author gravatar

      Thanks for this thoughtful response to the decision at Mount Holyoke not to produce the play. I wrote about this a few weeks ago that when Catholic University or a conservative campus shuts down a production of The Vagina Monologues, we call it misogyny. This demand that people with vaginas STFU and stop talking about vaginas is also misogyny, although it may come from within a feminist women’s community.

      This whole fracas reminds me of what a senior scholar once told me: “I loved teaching at a Catholic University, because although I wasn’t a women’s historian, I was viewed as SO RADICAL just by my very presence.” Apparently, even at Mount Holyoke College (!!!), having a vag and talking about it is still a dangerous position to take

      (My post: http://www.historiann.com/2015/01/21/there-are-no-founding-mothers-just-embarassing-aunties-and-cleaner-uppers-the-care-work-we-demand-of-women-and-no-one-else/)

    • Author gravatar

      One of the many strengths of Eve’s work, including The Vagina Monologues, is that it transforms feminist theory from the privileged halls of academia and grounds it in the truth of women’s lives at the grassroots where it is most needed. One of the intractable challenges of feminism is the question of how to make its ideas available to masses of folks whose main source of information is the white supremacist patriarchal media. Eve’s work does this in a powerfully integral way – embodied, cognitive, affective, spiritual – trusting and supporting grassroots women (of all kinds) to take charge of their own healing and simultaneously empower others.

      I find it deeply disappointing when feminists purporting to strengthen intersectional understanding attack the work of other feminists whose work has, in fact, been manifestly intersectional on a global scale. In my view, this kind of behavior emerges from and reinforces dominator, patriarchal conditioning, which of course, we all struggle against.

    • Author gravatar

      Reblogged this on Knitting Clio.

    • Author gravatar

      I once asked Eve Ensler, in a post-performance Q&A, why all the monologues were about “vaginas” when it appeared that really they were about vulvas, plus perhaps more. She said that she went with “vagina” because no one knew what a “vulva” was. It struck me as important because it’s hard to talk about orgasms if a woman’s sexual parts are all labeled one big “vagina.” But maybe it’s important here, too. Was the Vagina Monologues ever really meant to be about a specific anatomic part? Or is it really about the social and cultural construction of women’s sexuality and bodies? Part of Ensler’s point throughout the monologues is that women’s sexuality does not need to be rooted in one ideal kind of woman’s body parts, that need to look/smell/perform in one particular way. Perhaps that perspective could be used to create a more trans-friendly rendering of the play. I’d like to see what a sympathetic and smart director could do with it (in addition to Ensler’s own edits).

      • Author gravatar

        I like Larafreidenfields comment. Using the idea of the word “mansplaining”, I don’t think we should “vaginasplain” transgender and intersex concerns. No offence intended but I think we should acknowledge our privilege on this one.

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