Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies

You have to say the word "vagina" 128 times in the performance of The Vagina Monologues (TVM), reviews are quick to point out.¹ This, of course, does not include the numerous times we slip it into our conversations with colleagues, friends, and families. The San Francisco Chronicle recounts the plight of the New York businessman at the Savoy Brasserie, sitting at a table next to the one where sixty-six women were simulating orgasmic moans in response to a post-show suggestion that each woman introduce herself by sharing her name and her signature orgasm.² The Moxie magazine review declares: "In a final show-stopping showcase of vaginal prowess, Ensler reaches a nipple-swelling crescendo, gasping the mantra 'cunt' over and over again, between intermittent moans. Men in the audience goggle with the male equivalent of penis envy."³ Campaigning for women's issues, Ensler urges students to "'Value your vagina: vote' and 'Get your pussy posses to the polls'" at the University of Colorado.⁴ One is left with the sense that it is the unabashed drive of the "V-Word" that is credited with the mystical power of undoing patriarchal discourses on the body and on sexuality, that unlocking the repressed will heal all.

My own rhetorical strategy, the gratuitous sexual salaciousness amassed in my opening paragraph, mirrors this sense of piling up images to create interest and titillation. But I am also interested in the piling up of other discourses that are invoked by means of the embarrassed laughter. Principal among these is the constant slippage between the "V" of "vagina" and the "V" of violence in materials that describe the play and the V-Day project that has spun out of it. (Other creative uses of "V" have been "Vote" in the context of Ensler's campaigns on college campuses for candidates who would support women's issues, the "V-Spot" to give organizers information, "V-Men" narratives from supportive males, and of course the ever-present "Valentine's Day" associations from which the pinkness, the performance dates, and the call for women to appreciate violence-free love derive.) The raison d'être of TVM and V-Day [End Page 31] is said to be the discovery of ever-newer forms of violence against women and of action, both performative and political, taken against them. While a few of these forms of violence, such as sexual assault and denigration of genitalia, are depicted in U.S. locations, violence is the primary register through which "the global" is evoked, the main lens for looking outside the United States. These global locations serve to signify the terror that is used to hold the laughter in balance, to validate the seriousness of the enterprise, while the "vagina" pieces are more directly associated with pleasure and sexuality and set in the United States.

I focus in this essay on the depiction of the "global" body in TVM and on related questions of coalition and solidarity in "global" feminist politics. The play TVM and the larger V-Day project serve as appropriate sites for such examination because they explicitly take on the question of eradicating forms of violence against women in global scope. "Monologues" mean that violence is represented in the first person, but unlike the U.S. monologues, the non-U.S. pieces are not first-person narratives. Who gets to name these forms of violence? What might be the political interests behind such naming, and what advantages do they carry for the namers? How can differently situated groups of women foreground their own political and cultural positions while working alongside others?

These are, of course, questions at the core of feminist politics: they require us to interrogate the primacy of gender, and to track the ways in which intersections of race or nationality or class or sexuality complicate gendered analyses. This essay traces the "ventriloqual" moves of TVM around these questions, as performers project, render experiences, and speak "for" women assumed to be invisible and silent, thereby foregrounding the cultural assumptions and political imperatives of the writers' and performers' locations...