Is the Staged Vagina Always White?

Abstract

In 2003 the Women’s Center, a student-led organization, at Western Washington University opened a new show called The Vagina Memoirs. This new program replaced the annual V Day production of Eve Ensler’s 1996 play The Vagina Monologues (TVM) with the argument that Ensler’s approach was “racist and transphobic” (Kato, H. 2013, personal communication, June). This piece, however, is not to debate the Vagina Monologues, but to use it as a starting point to discuss the problems with producing documentary plays that focus on the self and the “free” ability or “choice” that artists have in presenting “truths” about themselves especially when the group is constituted by racial and sexual minorities. People of color and sexual minorities have not and are not afforded the same freedoms to voice their experiences because of historical and structural factors that limit who gets to speak, what they are “permitted” to say, and whether their messages are actually understood and heard. As I argue below, while the presentation of diverse voices within documentary plays suggests a level of egalitarianism, equity and choice, this façade masks how relations of power affect the gathering, writing, and the public production of minority lived experiences. I discuss these problems within the context of the experiences that have occurred on my campus and the students’ creation of their own documentary play called the Vagina Memoirs.

Keywords: The Vagina Monologues

DOI: 10.7176/JEP/10-21-13

Publication date:July 31^st 2019