Word: ensler
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...Amherst Regional High School in Amherst, Mass. The local school board and superintendent last month approved a student request to stage The Vagina Monologues the night before Valentine's Day as part of a national campaign to call attention to violence against women. The theater piece, written by Eve Ensler, has played off-Broadway and in all-star benefits around the country and the world on Valentine's Day for the past six years. But this is believed to be the first sanctioned high school performance of the play, a collection of readings on such topics as homosexuality, rape...
...must be due to patriarchal oppression and/or sexual assault. But false consciousness is inherently condescending. It tells many women—perhaps even most women—that their way of living and thinking and presenting themselves as women is inauthentic. The paternalistic implication is that Ensler knows what these women really think and really want, and if they listen to her, they will be enlightened and realize she is right. After all, you have to trust a girl named Eve to help you “discover” your “true womanhood...
Ensler’s official website boasts that her play “has given a voice to women of all ages all over the world.” Ensler never attributes her stories to anyone. They may be composites of people she talked with. They may be complete reproductions of one side of a conversation. The monologues were all originally interviews. Ensler has written herself as interviewer out of the dialogue, and re-inserted herself as the interpreter of what she has now constructed as a monologue...
Don’t ask yourself, “Which monologue am I?,” because that is just letting Ensler tell you who you are, and her play reflects a tiny fragment of the breadth of women’s experience. Even in the Ensler era, many voices remain excluded. What about women who have not had the opportunity to go to college, who are excluded from performing since the bread and butter of Ensler’s enterprise is V-Day performances at colleges and universities? Where is the transsexual woman who loves her female sexuality...
...there’s one thing you can’t deny Ensler, it’s that her play does encourage dialogue about the vagina. If that expands to include broader discussions of patriarchy, gender and sexuality, great. Ensler’s woman-types are more affirming and complex than those presented in much of Western culture. But if it stops with Eve’s Vagina, then we’re not much better off than we were before...