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Constituting the Indigenous Woman, the White Woman, and the Audience in Eve Ensler's the Vagina Monologues1

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Constituting the Indigenous Woman, the White Woman, and the Audience in Eve Ensler's the Vagina Monologues1 "I'm All of Everything That I Am": Constituting the Indigenous Woman, the White Woman, and the Audience in Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues1 Tara Williamson is an For the past few years, I participated in Anishinaabekwe/Nehayowak from Swan Lake, a VDay Campaign. VDay has been embraced Manitoba and is a member of the Opaskwayak by women's movements across the world (but, Cree Nation. She holds a Bachelor of Social mostly in North America) to focus on the W ork from the University of Manitoba and is elimination of violence against women. Its most currently in the last year of a concurrent well-known campaign strategy is the staging of LL.B./M.A. - Indigenous Governance program The Vagina Monologues (VMs) by Eve Ensler. at the University of Victoria. The play is a series of monologues that are based on interviews Ensler conducted with Abstract women about their relationships with their The author's analysis highlights the vaginas. reinforcement of stereotypical images of native As an Indigenous woman women in The Vagina Monologues. She (Anishinaabe/Nehayo), I experienced the play suggests that alternative with mixed emotion. I felt disconnected from performances/performativities of the play would many of the cast members and I disagreed with better challenge oppression and would foster a the image of the Indigenous woman that the more complex understanding of race, class, play presented. I eventually came to understand and gender. that my experience of myself could not be Résumé contained within the discourse of the play's L’analyse de l’auteure souligne le renforcement white feminism. To better understand my des images stéréotypes des femmes experience, I have scripted a 3-Act play that autochtones dans la pièce intitulée “The Vagina portrays, from my experience, the role of the Monologues”. Elle suggère que des exécutions Indigenous woman, the White woman, and the /performances alternatives de la pièce seraient Audience in The Vagina Monologues production mieux utilisés attirer des observations sur of which I was a part. The analyses that follow l’oppression et pour encourager une the first two Acts demonstrate how the play compréhension plus complexe sur la race, la stabilizes a stereotypical and essentialized classe et le genre. image of "Indigenous" and how this image is connected to the maintenance of white privilege. The final analysis attempts to give agency to the constructed Indigenous subject by exploring possible alternative performances of the play and the tropes within it. ACT I – THE ROLE OF THE INDIGENOUS WOMAN Scene I Scene. Bare stage. Photograph of a dreamcatcher on projection screen. Pow Wow music playing. Dim red lighting. Raise spotlight on stage left while music fades. 68 Atlantis 34.1, 2009 PR www.msvu.ca/atlantis [Enter Indigenous Woman #1 – Stage Left.] deconstructed (primarily) by women of colour Scene II and non-Western women, the presence of Indigenous W oman #1: This monologue is essentialism in feminism is still felt in both based on interviews by Eve Ensler with women theory and practice. The use of the "vagina" as from the Oglala Lakota Nation on the Pine an interchange for "woman" is a good Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Their demonstration of this essentialism. stories reflect the challenges that Native women The VMs present the vagina as a face every day living in isolation and without sentient being who is anthropomorphized by her resources. According to the Amnesty woman. In the monologue "W ear/Say/Smell" International report "Maze of Injustice," the (which is actually presented by three speakers), average annual rate of rape and sexual assault the actors present women's answers to the among American Indian Women is 2.5 times questions: "What would your vagina wear?," higher than all other races. "What would your vagina say?," and "What [Exit Indigenous Woman #1] does your vagina smell like?" While the final Scene III question is usually answered in the form of an Scene. Same scene as Scene I, except a chair observation, the former questions involve on stage right. Raise spotlight on chair. women reflecting on an imaginary being in a [Enter Indigenous Woman #2] way that might be cloaked in a detached Indigenous Woman #2: I looked up and he third-person type of inquiry but in reality is slapped me, my husband...He had long black inevitably personal, because nobody knows the hair, combing his long hair when we made love answer but the woman being interviewed. The it got loose before...After 18 years he beat me, voice of the vagina is necessarily the woman in the morning when he was so nice again. I speaking. Christine M. Cooper describes this would braid his long hair. I would take my time reductionism as a kind of metonymy whereby "a like I cared so much and I would do it perfectly part of the body and a particular subset of crooked...Heard that he was out with a woman experience [stands] in for the whole of female making love and she was fluffing his hair when consciousness" (Cooper 2007, 732). The types he was wild on top of her...He wrapped my long of responses elicited by the vagina questions black hair around his hand, jerked my head. are even more provocative in that they can be deconstructed further to better delineate the The Role of the Indigenous Woman - nature of the woman/vagina voice. Analysis All of the answers to the questions The setting of, introduction for, and the reflect the limiting and static nature of the actual monologue "Crooked Braid" all contain questions. Women are forced to consider the problematic images of the Indigenous woman. one thing that their vagina would say or wear or By analyzing the intersection of gender and do. Certainly, some women answer with more race, these stereotypical and clichéd images than one phrase or article of clothing, but, the acquire a broader context. effect is still the same. Answering the questions As a feminist project, the Vagina involves deciding what thing (or things) Monologues is vulnerable to attack on the basis essentially defines the vagina, and accordingly, of its narrow perspective of womanhood that is the woman. The answers are not accurate grounded in racist and classist values. representations of reality - (if you accept that Feminism continues to be a largely Western the talking vagina is a literal impossibility) but movement that first asserted its power via an instead are the well-thought out versions by the essentializing claim that "all women shared woman being questioned. The following some universal characteristics and suffered responses from cast members are particularly from universal oppressions which could be good examples: understood and described by a group of predominantly white, Western-trained, women "What would your vagina wear?" academics" (Tuhiwai-Smith 2001, 166). W hile "faery wings of course" these premises have been challenged and "ninjitsu pants and randomly dress in silly costumes" www.msvu.ca/atlantis PR Atlantis 34.1, 2009 69 "a masquerade costume" non-white women in contrast with white women, "it would probably wear cotton" it's easy to understand why non-white women "black velvet and a red feather boa" would want to access the white vagina goddess. The question could just as easily have The only time violence is directly been "What would you, in expressing your addressed in the monologues is when the womanhood, wear?" The vagina thus becomes speakers are non-white. The violence that the an object of desire for the expression of non-white women experience includes rape, womanhood - a subjective, acid burning, civil war, murder, domestic archetypically-dressed woman. However, violence, dismemberment, and female genital everyday life - with its misogyny, social mutilation. These non-white vaginas are also pressures, mainstream boundaries, and inanimate - they do not dream or aspire or get practical demands - prevents women from dressed up. They are victims. Remember that being the women they envision. Instead, Indigenous women face challenges as women wander through the world always Indigenous women because we live "in isolation lacking something bigger and better (i.e., and without resources." W e are pitifully feather boas and faery wings). This is the helpless. The Afghani, Mexican, and Iraqi conception of femininity that is espoused by the women have no voice. They are so helpless, essential, talking vagina. It fosters a feminism victimized and silenced that other women must that focuses on lack and valourizes an image of speak for them (the name of the monologue is woman as dehistoricized and depoliticized. "The Memory of Her Face" [emphasis added]). Because certainly, politics and history must be As Cooper points out, the "gender irrelevant if all you need to access the essentialism…transmutes to cultural archetype of woman is a vagina. essentialism" (2007, 747). This is particularly Except that if you are a non-white clear in the image of the Indigenous woman as woman in the VMs, you are not allowed to talk presented in "Crooked Braid." about your vagina. Or, at least it's not in your Besides being helpless, isolated, and script. In the 2007 VDay Production, there were without resources, this Indigenous woman two monologues that represented non-white speaks in extremely colloquial English - women (one of the monologues had a trilogy of sometimes inverting sentences and sometimes speakers). While every other monologue speaking with phrases that aren't actually includes either the word "vagina" or "cunt," - sentences. This Indigenous woman has long and one that instead used the euphemism dark hair and she identifies with pow wow "down there" - non-white women's monologues music and dreamcatchers with feathers. Finally, did not reference the all-powerful it is hard not to be misled by the title of the vagina-as-woman at all.
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