ABSTRACT

In the mid-1990s, playwright and performer Eve Ensler wrote The Vagina Monologues. 1 Created from a series of interviews with women on the subject of their bodies and their experiences with violence, the Monologues achieved immediate success and won an Obie Award (1997) and a Guggenheim Fellowship Award (1999). The text’s agenda is premised on Ensler’s observation that “bad things are happening to women’s vaginas everywhere.” 2 As of today, the play has been translated into 48 languages, performed in thousands of venues, and become the basis of a global movement against gender violence. Born out of Ensler’s personal experience with battering and rape and her theatrical and grassroots feminist activism, 3 V-Day is a transformational project supported by drama. Every year, communities around the planet join the project, becoming, as actor Glenn Close has termed it, “part of her crusade.” 4 On the creative side, V-Day has spawned other full-length plays, such as Necessary Targets (2001), The Good Body (2004), or I Am an Emotional Creature (2010). It has also produced the documentary films V-Day: Until the Violence Stops (2003) and What I Want My Words to Do to You (2004), and a book of photographs entitled Vagina Warriors (2005). Adopting Erika Fischer-Lichte’s thesis about the transformative power of performance, 5 this chapter examines Ensler’s leadership and her gender-violence-centered dramatic production. By looking at both branches of V-Day—the political and the artistic—through the lenses of theories such as Michel Foucault’s and Hélène Cixous’s, it attempts to demonstrate that theater in the twenty-first century continues to be a weapon for consciousness-raising, denunciation of abuse, and transformation of mentalities and everyday practices, such that can bring real-life benefits to women around the world.