49 pages • 1 hour read
Eve EnslerThe Vagina Monologues
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1996A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Ideological Context: Modern Feminism
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses rape, sexual assault, and domestic and systemic violence against women.
The Vagina Monologues is a specific response to the violence of patriarchal systems and the misogynistic cultures they breed. Patriarchy is a system in which men hold most, or all, of the power because the system views women as secondary. The violence women suffer at the hands of their husbands, partners, strangers, and governments or militaries is a direct consequence of such systems because misogynistic beliefs objectify and dehumanize women. One tool of that system that The Vagina Monologues rebels against is the erasure or censorship of language, like banning the word “vagina” because of its seemingly shameful or overtly sexual connotation. Feminism refers to the resistance and dismantling of such patriarchal systems.
Feminism in the United States is often described using the wave metaphor, which suggests four separate waves of feminism. The first wave describes the fight for women’s right to vote in the early 19th century. The second wave describes the fight for broader gender equality in the 1960s and 1970s. When V performed the original production of The Vagina Monologues in 1996, the United States was in its third wave of feminism, a movement marked by fighting for the liberation of feminine sexual identity, the recognition of gender identity as a social construct, and women taking back their bodies through performance (like The Vagina Monologues). The notion of intersectionality, which recognizes that oppression has layers and that women are complicit in oppressing other women—such as earlier waves of feminism that ignored the specific oppression of Black women—rose to prominence during the third wave. The fourth wave of feminism, which began around 2012, examines liberation from constructed gender norms, particularly through social media and the internet.
This edition of The Vagina Monologues examines global and personal events like Hurricane Katrina, the comfort women enslaved by the Japanese military, and domestic violence through the lens of intersectional feminism. Intersectional feminism accounts for the ways women experience oppression through not only sexism but also other systems like racism, ableism, colonialism, and/or socioeconomic status. Intersectional feminism attends to the individual positionalities of a woman rather than a generalized view of the oppression women face, recognizing that while oppression is inherent in all patriarchal systems, some women face multiple layers of oppression. Intersectional feminism thus focuses on dismantling all systems of oppression, including those perpetrated by other women.
Critical Context: Reception and Subsequent Editions
When The Vagina Monologues was first produced, the title itself was censored by television and radio stations and media outlets. The play was well received by audiences and critics, though over time, many critiques have shaped the creation and publication of updated editions.
Some critics viewed V’s original Vagina Monologues as attaching femininity to biology due to its concentration on the vagina. This sentiment both conflates a woman’s identity with her vagina and excludes women, such as transgender women, who do not have vaginas yet experience the same kinds of violence and oppression investigated in the play.
Though third-wave feminism is acknowledged as being more inclusive than previous movements, some critics identify V’s original play as colonial; global perspectives in the play primarily center on sexual violence as being told by a woman in the global Northwest, while multiple depictions of pleasure in the play are centered in the United States—yet simultaneously claiming a global struggle felt by all women in the same ways.
The 2018 edition of The Vagina Monologues includes a “Spotlight Monologues’’ section that adds a new dimension to the original play and includes speakers whose voices were unaccounted for in the original play, including trans and Indigenous women.
Another monologue, “The Little Coochi Snorcher That Could,” faced criticism for its depiction of a sexual encounter between a 13-year-old girl and a 24-year-old woman. The encounter is presented positively in the monologue: After a childhood marked by sexual violence, the speaker first experiences sexual pleasure with the older woman, who gives her alcohol and lingerie. After criticism pointing out that the encounter legally constitutes statutory rape, the speaker’s age was updated to 16 in later editions.
