The Vagina Monologues in a Chinese Context: Discussing the Value of the Localized Adaptations

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.

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

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.

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

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.