The Vagina Monologues: Theoretical, Geopolitical, and Pedagogical Concerns

Abstract

This essay explores the pedagogical possibilities and pitfalls inherent in using Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues and its attendant antiviolence organization, V-Day, as an example of transnational feminist antiviolence organizing and activism. While acknowledging the importance of the play and V-Day in antiviolence fund-raising efforts and in generating awareness of the global ubiquity of gender-based violence, I contend that the play, as well as the global antiviolence movement that has grown up around it, relies almost exclusively on U.S.-based feminist epistemologies, subjectivities, and theoretical perspectives that are embedded within an American nationalist discourse¹ that positions the United States as the “rescuer” of poor, brown women from the global South, who, as many feminist scholars have convincingly argued over the course of the last twenty years or so, are repeatedly depicted in American media—and by mainstream U.S. feminism—as a singular, powerless, and passive group (Mani, 1990; Mohanty, 1991; Narayan, 1997; Dell, 2002). This depiction has been reified and exaggerated since the days immediately following 9/11 when the Bush administration strategically (and successfully) justified the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan by arguing that the United States must “save” the women of Afghanistan from their (racialized, male) Muslim oppressors.

In order for the human race to continue, women must be safe and empowered. It’s an obvious idea, but like a vagina, it needs great attention and love in order to be revealed.

—Eve Ensler (2001, xxxvi)