Монологи Вагины: Пьеса Евы Энслер о женском опыте.

1996 play by Eve Ensler

The Vagina Monologues is an episodic play written in 1996 by Eve Ensler which developed and premiered at HERE Arts Center, Off Off Broadway in New York and was followed by an Off Broadway run in at Westside Theatre. The play explores consensual and nonconsensual sexual experiences, body image, genital mutilation, direct and indirect encounters with reproduction, vaginal care, menstrual periods, prostitution, and several other topics through the eyes of women with various ages, races, sexualities, and other differences. Charles Isherwood of The New York Times called the play "probably the most important piece of political theater of the last decade." In 2018, The New York Times stated "No recent hour of theater has had a greater impact worldwide" in an article "The Great Work Continues: The 25 Best American Plays Since 'Angels in America. Ensler originally starred in both the HERE premiere and in the first off Broadway production, which was produced by David Stone, Nina Essman, Dan Markley, The Araca Group, Willa Shalit and the West Side Theater. When she left the play, it was recast with three celebrity monologists. The play has been staged internationally, and a television version featuring Ensler was produced by cable TV channel HBO. In 1998, Ensler and others, including Willa Shalit, a producer of the Westside Theatre production, launched V Day, a global non profit movement that has raised over for groups working to end violence against women (including those who hold fluid identities that are subject to gender based violence), through benefits of The Vagina Monologues. In 2011, Ensler was awarded the Isabelle Stevenson Award at the 65th Tony Awards, which recognizes an individual from the theater community who has made a substantial contribution of volunteered time and effort on behalf of humanitarian, social service, or charitable organizations for her creation of the V Day movement.

Eve Ensler wrote the first draft of the monologues in 1996 (there have been several revisions since) following interviews she conducted with 200 women about their views on sex, relationships, and violence against women. The interviews began as casual conversations with her friends, who then brought up anecdotes they themselves had been told by other friends; this began a continuing chain of referrals. In an interview with Women. com, Ensler said that her fascination with vaginas began because of "growing up in a violent society". "Women's empowerment is deeply connected to their sexuality." She also stated, "I'm obsessed with women being violated and raped, and with incest. All of these things are deeply connected to our vaginas." Ensler wrote the piece to "celebrate the vagina". Ensler states that in 1998, the purpose of the piece changed from a celebration of vaginas and femininity to a movement to stop violence against women. This was the start of the V Day movement which has continued strong every year since, has turned into a worldwide phenomenon, and a very successful non profit organization. The play gained popularity through sold out performances, media coverage and word of mouth. "In 2001, V Day sold out New York's Madison Square Garden with more than seventy actors performing. The evening raised $1 million raised for groups working to end violence against women and girls." "After "The Vagina Monologues" debuted in 1996, it quickly became a hit. Soon, Eve Ensler's episodic play had graduated from off off Broadway to Madison Square Garden to college stages the world over." In 2004, an all transgender performance of The Vagina Monologues was held for the first time. The performance was covered by the 2006 documentary Beautiful Daughters, which displays the hardships the all transgender cast faced with the production. The play was also adapted into a Marathi play called Yonichya Maneechya Gujagoshti by feminist writer activist Vandana Khare in the year 2009. Gabriela Youth, the one and only national democratic mass organization for young women in the Philippines also adapted the play into a Tagalog theatrical show called "Ang Usapang Puke" with its student members from the Polytechnic University of the Philippines in the year 2018.

V Day is a non profit 501(c)(3) organization The V Day organization encourages the renditions to include as many diverse actors as possible. performance of The Vagina Monologues, with readings by eighteen notable transgender women and including a new monologue documenting the experiences of transgender women. It debuted in connection with "LA V DAY Until the Violence Stops" with monologues documenting the violence against transgender women. Since that debut, many university and college productions have included these three "Transgender Monologues". Beautiful Daughters (2006) is a documentary about the cast of the first performance by transgender women.

An article in Signs by Christine M. Cooper begins by applauding The Vagina Monologues for benefit performances done within the first six years (1998–2004). These performances raised over $20 million, 85 percent of which was donated to grassroots organizations that fight against violence towards women.

The Vagina Monologues has been criticized by some within the feminist movement, including pro sex feminists and individualist feminists. Sex positive feminist Betty Dodson, author of several books about female sexuality, saw the play as having a narrow and restrictive view of sexuality. Dodson's main concern seemed to be the lack of the term "clitoris" throughout the play. She believes that the play sends a message that the vagina is the main sex organ, not the clitoris. There is also criticism of The Vagina Monologues about its conflation of vaginas with women, more specifically for the message of the play that women are their vaginas, as Susan E. Bell and Susan M. Reverby argue, "Generations of feminists have argued that we are more than our bodies, more than a vagina or 'the sex'. Yet, TVM re inscribes women's politics in our bodies, indeed in our vaginas alone." The focus on women finding themselves through their vaginas, many say, seems more like a Second Wave consciousness raising group rather than a ground breaking, inter sectional, Third Wave cornerstone. Although members of American University's Women's Initiative believe that the show was revolutionary in the 1990s, they concluded that equating having a vagina with being a woman is not an accurate display of womanhood in the 2010s, suggesting that The Vagina Monologues continues to perpetuate the gender binary and erase the identity of those who are genderqueer.

Kim Hall, a professor of philosophy at Appalachian State University, further criticizes the play, particularly the sections dealing with women in developing countries, for contributing to "colonialist conceptions of non Western women", such as the piece "My Vagina Was My Village." Although she supports frank discussions about sex, Hall rescales many of the same critiques leveled by feminists of color at "White privilege" among second wave feminists: "premature white feminist assumptions and celebrations of a global 'sisterhood.'" In 2013, Columbia University's V Day decided to stage the play with a cast entirely of non White women. That decision, too, was controversial.

The play has also been criticized by social conservatives, such as the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property (TFP) and the Network of Enlightened Women. The TFP denounced it as "a piece replete with sexual encounters, lust, graphic descriptions of masturbation and lesbian behavior", urging students and parents to protest. Following TFP and other protests, performances were cancelled at sixteen Catholic colleges. Saint Louis University made the decision not to endorse the 2007 production, claiming the yearly event was getting to be "redundant". The response of the university's student led feminist organization was to continue the production at an off campus location.

In 2000, Robert Swope, a conservative contributor to a Georgetown University newspaper, The Hoya, wrote an article critical of the play. He suggested there was a contradiction between the promotion of rape awareness on V Day and the monologue "The Little Coochie Snorcher That Could", in which an adult woman recalls that being given alcohol and statutorily raped at 13 by a 24 year old woman was a positive, healing experience, ending the segment with the proclamation "It was a good rape." Outcry from the play's supporters resulted in Swope being fired from the staff of The Hoya, before the piece was even run. Swope had previously criticized the play in an article he wrote entitled "Georgetown Women's Center: Indispensable Asset or Improper Expenditure?" His termination received critical editorial coverage in The Wall Street Journal, Salon, National Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Times, The Weekly Standard, and by Wendy McElroy of iFeminists. The controversy resulted in the script being modified in 2008 to change the age of the statutorily raped girl from 13 to 16 and to remove the "good rape" line. Inspired by The Vagina Monologues, many colleges have gone on to develop their own plays. Performances at colleges are always different, not always pre written, and sometimes feature actors writing their own monologue. The Vagina Monologues also served as inspiration for Yoni Ki Baat, the "South Asian adaptation of The Vagina Monologues", and as loose inspiration for The Manic Monologues, "the mental illness version of The Vagina Monologues." The Cardinal Newman Society has criticized the performance of the play on Catholic college campuses. In 2011 ten of the fourteen Catholic universities hosting the Monologues were Jesuit institutions. The Jesuit Tim Clancy, pastor and philosophy professor at Gonzaga University, explains why he supports VM performances on campus: "They are not arguments – they are stories stories of pain and suffering, stories of shame, violation and impotence" that lead to discussions on "the extremes of the human condition", responding to the call of Pope Benedict for Jesuits in their work to explore "the boundaries resulting from an erroneous or superficial vision of God and man that stand between faith and human knowledge".

The Vagina Monologues at HBO. com