Queerness, Disability, and The Vagina Monologues

Hypatia ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-119
Author(s):  
Kim Q. Hall
Keyword(s):  
Vagina Monologues

Modes of Feminine Resistance and Testimony in the Wake of the Mudawana Reform and the Arab Uprisings

2019 ◽  
pp. 192-224
Author(s):  
Naïma Hachad
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Easy Access ◽  
Women's Activism ◽  
Major Transitions ◽  
The Public ◽  
Arab Uprisings ◽  
Collective Representation ◽  
Moroccan Women ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Vagina Monologues

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.

Queerness, Disability, and The Vagina Monologues

Hypatia ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-119 ◽  
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.

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

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.

Postmillennial cancer narratives: feminism and postfeminism in Eve Ensler’s In the Body of the World

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-252
Author(s):  
Marta Fernández-Morales
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Uterine Cancer ◽  
The Body ◽  
First Century ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
The World ◽  
Health And Illness ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Vagina Monologues

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 twenty-first century, Tasha Dubriwny 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 of Ensler’s uterine cancer memoir In the Body of the World, and focusing particularly on its structure and narrative strategies, this article 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.

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