초록 열기/닫기 버튼
This study examines how The Vagina Monologues performs a social ritual which creates social changes by establishing new identities. Eve Ensler makes the most private aspects public by speaking loud onto a public stage and renders taboo topics visible and speakable. The collection of monologues, molded with various women’s personal stories about their vaginas, connects women by the vagina and distills multiple voices into one voice on stage. Sharing the stories and experience is the process of reclaiming women’s subjectivity and the personal stories become political beyond the stage, transcending national boundaries. Ensler draws upon strategic essentialism which defines women’s self as a vagina to assert women’s empowerment and reinforce the cohesion of women’s community. The vaginas act as a site in which we examine our gender oppression and find a liberative self. The play deconstructs gender ideology, the unitary phallic world view and demonstrates new directions and possibilities of women’s subjectivity in a ritualized way. The voice of women as a community gives birth to a collective energy and leads the audience to raise their consciousness and participate in their communitas. Communitas, as Victor Turner defines it, is an ideal, cooperative community in liminality. With the creative, subversive potential of liminality, the ritual has the ability to instigate social changes. V-Day, a globally organized social movement reflects the success of the social ritual and illustrates how a play, a work of art is changed into a work of politics.
