Ensler Moves the Master’s Tool a Little Closer: A Closer Look at Deconstructing (Dis)cumfort Zones and the Tale of the Amazing MiddleClassWhite Vagina
It is almost funny, were it not so terribly grim, the way Eve Ensler’s project works as a two-pronged attack against Audre Lorde’s seminal piece “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” We all know the intention and premise of The Vagina Monologues: none of the ladies of the U.S. are comfortable with their vaginas, in fact, society itself is vagina-phobic so Eve Ensler sets out to empower women through their sex and change our uncomfortable culture one performance at a time.
But the enactment of Ensler’s good will has two major, destructive flaws. On college campuses the performance draws titillated and “allied”* men who disrupt vagina-community in the piece “CUNT!” Second, tokenized accounts of women of color and poor women give the illusion of diversity while flattening differences and re-privileging the straight, white, middle-class vagina.
Ensler’s project to acclimate the world to vagina is an old sex-positive, feminist project. She does collapse sex (organs) and sex(ual intercourse) into some one thing and then tries to vindicate both from proscriptive mores and undue fret. It was part of Dorothy Allison’s agenda with the Lesbian Sex Mafia, which she details in Skin. It’s part of sociologist, Deborah Tolman’s project in, “Doing Desire” as she tries to untangle the difficulties of articulating female desire that young women face. However, Tolman’s book Dilemmas of Desire, as a written text, is usually experienced alone. The Lesbian Sex Mafia’s partial success was predicated upon creating safe spaces. Ensler brings a fraught and tender subject into public space with the hope that bringing the subject there will dissolve or loosen surrounding trauma.
Men are encouraged to view the performance to hopefully destroy their own discomforts surrounding the vagina. However, male presence reifies internalized anxieties and further undoes women’s sense of sexual autonomy in the segment entitled, “CUNT!” In this skit, a performer urges the audience into choruses of the word. But when the male members out-yell the women, the exercise does more harm than good. Allison’s safe space is null. Tolman’s quiet interview rooms and private writing cannot compensate.
There is a room full of men, thinking of themselves as enlightened feminists, (RE)claiming the word ‘CUNT.’ Lorde’s “tools” can be re-imagined: in a supposedly feminist move to take back the word cunt. It is almost as if, from his grave, Aristotle is actually turning the vagina inside-out and into a penis again. As a result, the word never gets handed over, even for the women who attended the Monologues, ‘cunt’ still belongs to men.
The second way in which Ensler’s piece works against Audre Lorde’s is perhaps even more explicit. In “The Master’s Tools…” Lorde addresses her own tokenized presence at a “feminist” conference. Ensler repeats the same tokenization and exoticization of vaginas, making spectacles, give the illusion of true diversity, and steamrolling race and class.
Ensler's inclusion of the diversifying vaginas is pathetic at best and frankly "enriching," like in the part when she attempts to imply racial and ethnic diversity with a catalogue of vagina-names. Refugee and Native American women are later additions to the monologues and both their accounts are brutally violent. So it comes as no surprise when Ensler describes sex workers’ relationships with their vaginas to be “rich and complex.” She adds them in order to enrich and complicate.
What she does by setting their stories aside is exactly what Lorde worries about. Ensler draws from women of color and other minority women explicitly for coloring, marginalized, and minority-specific stories. This tacitly reaffirms the essentialist belief that all minority women have to offer feminism is limited and experience specific anecdotes. Once again we become the great white vagina’s zany and “wonderfully diverse” friends.
* Titillated men go to the performance for titillation. Allies go to show their support for lady-friends. Those seeing the play for the first time should be warned that the two cannot, necessarily, be discerned without intense questioning. Cursory questioning often prompts explanation, “I like vaginas!”
Works Cited
Allison, Dorothy. Skin.
Ensler, Eve. “Introduction” The Vagina Monologues.
Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.”
Tolman, Deborah, “Doing Desire: Adolescent Girls Struggle for/with Sexuality.” Dilemmas of Desire.
But the enactment of Ensler’s good will has two major, destructive flaws. On college campuses the performance draws titillated and “allied”* men who disrupt vagina-community in the piece “CUNT!” Second, tokenized accounts of women of color and poor women give the illusion of diversity while flattening differences and re-privileging the straight, white, middle-class vagina.
Ensler’s project to acclimate the world to vagina is an old sex-positive, feminist project. She does collapse sex (organs) and sex(ual intercourse) into some one thing and then tries to vindicate both from proscriptive mores and undue fret. It was part of Dorothy Allison’s agenda with the Lesbian Sex Mafia, which she details in Skin. It’s part of sociologist, Deborah Tolman’s project in, “Doing Desire” as she tries to untangle the difficulties of articulating female desire that young women face. However, Tolman’s book Dilemmas of Desire, as a written text, is usually experienced alone. The Lesbian Sex Mafia’s partial success was predicated upon creating safe spaces. Ensler brings a fraught and tender subject into public space with the hope that bringing the subject there will dissolve or loosen surrounding trauma.
Men are encouraged to view the performance to hopefully destroy their own discomforts surrounding the vagina. However, male presence reifies internalized anxieties and further undoes women’s sense of sexual autonomy in the segment entitled, “CUNT!” In this skit, a performer urges the audience into choruses of the word. But when the male members out-yell the women, the exercise does more harm than good. Allison’s safe space is null. Tolman’s quiet interview rooms and private writing cannot compensate.
There is a room full of men, thinking of themselves as enlightened feminists, (RE)claiming the word ‘CUNT.’ Lorde’s “tools” can be re-imagined: in a supposedly feminist move to take back the word cunt. It is almost as if, from his grave, Aristotle is actually turning the vagina inside-out and into a penis again. As a result, the word never gets handed over, even for the women who attended the Monologues, ‘cunt’ still belongs to men.
The second way in which Ensler’s piece works against Audre Lorde’s is perhaps even more explicit. In “The Master’s Tools…” Lorde addresses her own tokenized presence at a “feminist” conference. Ensler repeats the same tokenization and exoticization of vaginas, making spectacles, give the illusion of true diversity, and steamrolling race and class.
Ensler's inclusion of the diversifying vaginas is pathetic at best and frankly "enriching," like in the part when she attempts to imply racial and ethnic diversity with a catalogue of vagina-names. Refugee and Native American women are later additions to the monologues and both their accounts are brutally violent. So it comes as no surprise when Ensler describes sex workers’ relationships with their vaginas to be “rich and complex.” She adds them in order to enrich and complicate.
What she does by setting their stories aside is exactly what Lorde worries about. Ensler draws from women of color and other minority women explicitly for coloring, marginalized, and minority-specific stories. This tacitly reaffirms the essentialist belief that all minority women have to offer feminism is limited and experience specific anecdotes. Once again we become the great white vagina’s zany and “wonderfully diverse” friends.
* Titillated men go to the performance for titillation. Allies go to show their support for lady-friends. Those seeing the play for the first time should be warned that the two cannot, necessarily, be discerned without intense questioning. Cursory questioning often prompts explanation, “I like vaginas!”
Works Cited
Allison, Dorothy. Skin.
Ensler, Eve. “Introduction” The Vagina Monologues.
Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.”
Tolman, Deborah, “Doing Desire: Adolescent Girls Struggle for/with Sexuality.” Dilemmas of Desire.
posted by RNovack at 11:45 PM
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