Textual Deviance: Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues and Catholic Campuses

Chapter 6 analyzes Qandisha, A Collaborative Feminine Magazwine, a webzine founded by Moroccan journalist and blogger Fedwa Misk in 2011 and Naïma Zitan’s Dialy (2012), a play in colloquial Moroccan-Arabic (Darija), as exemplars of how women’s activism and cultural production reinvigorated and gendered contemporary discourses of contestation. Dialy, originally conceived as an adaptation of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues (1996), uses testimonies collected during encounters and workshops involving a hundred and fifty Moroccan women of different ages and from different socioeconomic backgrounds to inscribe in the public sphere major transitions in a woman’s life such as menstruation, sexual relations, marriage, pregnancy, and childbearing. Qandisha has attracted a significant number of writers, readers, and commentators who post their texts in French, Arabic, Darija, and English from all over Morocco as well as from Algeria, France, and Tunisia about sexuality, rape, sexual orientation, and individual freedom. Anonymity, easy access, the dissolution of boundaries (between locales, languages, readers, and writers) have all provided women with endless possibilities for self and collective representation. This chapter analyzes the content and the reception of Dialy and Qandisha to illustrate contemporary divisions around women’s rights and sexuality in the Moroccan context, as well as the uneasy cohabitation between the Moroccan society’s diverse make-up and transnational feminist discourses and global technologies.

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Masking the truth: The writer of The Vagina Monologues (formerly known as Eve Ensler) speaks to Index about attacks on the truth. Plus a new version of her play about living in a nuclear wasteland

Index on Censorship ◽

10.1177/0306422020935356 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 49 (2) ◽

pp. 76-81

Author(s):

Jemimah Steinfeld

Keyword(s):

Vagina Monologues ◽

Eve Ensler

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Queerness, Disability, and The Vagina Monologues

Hypatia ◽

10.1111/j.1527-2001.2005.tb00375.x ◽

2005 ◽

Vol 20 (1) ◽

pp. 99-119 ◽

Cited By ~ 17

Author(s):

Kim Q. Hall

Keyword(s):

Compulsory Heterosexuality ◽

Dominant Discourses ◽

Vagina Monologues ◽

Point Of Departure

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.

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Más allá de los cuerpos dóciles. El teatro de Eve Ensler como proyecto ‘boaliano’

Futhark. Revista de Investigación y Cultura ◽

10.12795/futhark.2012.i07.05 ◽

2012 ◽

pp. 131-161

Author(s):

Marta Fernández Morales

Keyword(s):

Female Body ◽

Theatre Of The Oppressed ◽

Discursive Practices ◽

Dominant Culture ◽

Self Knowledge ◽

Women And Girls ◽

Vagina Monologues ◽

And Control ◽

Eve Ensler

In an interview that was published in 2001, U.S-born playwright Eve Ensler stated that her mission as an author and performer was to raise the consciousness of her audience about atrocity and injustice. Most of her plays, including the well-known and often staged The Vagina Monologues (1998), are devoted to the denunciation of atrocity and injustice as they are inscribed on the female body. In Ensler’s production, women and girls are placed at the narrative and dramaturgical centre, and their bodies become the source of anger and rage, but also of self-knowledge, rebellion, pleasure, and sisterhood. Within a potentially Boalian framework which intends to transform the audience, encouraging it to assume the role of an agent, Ensler articulates proposals that give voice to the female body as sexed cultural matter, in the line of The Good Body (2001), Fur Is Back (2007), and I Am an Emotional Creature (2010). My objective here will be to try and prove that Ensler’s theatrical praxis has a place within Augusto Boal’s (1931- 2009) universe of the Theatre of the Oppressed, and that her work is also developed around the aim of overcoming the Foucaultian concept of a ‘docile body’, urging girls and women to empower themselves precisely from a locus that the dominant culture has tried to objectify and control through its discursive practices: their body.

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