Restaging Women's Sexual Politics: Receptivity and Resistance to The Vagina Monologues Movement

The Vagina Monologues has been running for more than twenty years. It has debuted in more than 200 countries and has raised billions for the global “V-Day” movement to end domestic violence. But in a clash of ideologies of women’s sexual politics, the play attracts strong criticism from conservatives, radical feminists, marginalized women of color, and a spectrum of lesbian and queer activists. In this article, we explore the immediate success and contentious diffusion of The Vagina Monologues as we trace the play from its billing as a feminist rite of passage to its condemnation, alternately, as offending morality and as a relic of white, heterosexual, cisgender liberation. We elucidate how this movement and the dynamics of its variable reception exemplifies all that is at stake in a “restaging” of women’s private sexual troubles into a public realm—defined as the collective strategic movement of relational politics from one social sphere to another—as an explicit effort to resist and reformulate those politics.