tailieunhanh - Vaginal politics: Tensions and possibilities in The Vagina Monologues

As an important priority at the national and state levels, AMCHP has worked to address and reduce tobacco use among women of reproductive age, focusing specifically on pregnant and postpartum women. This first article in the 2008 Women’s Health Watch will highlight innovative strategies to reducing tobacco use among women. It will demonstrate the need, use, and success of smoking cessation counseling in helping pregnant and postpartum women quit smoking. The article will also discuss a new pregnancy and postpartum toolkit along with state examples of smoking cessation counseling programs to demonstrate strategies that increase provider and public awareness of. | ELSEVIER Women s Studies International Forum 28 2005 430-444 WOMEN S STUDIES INTERNATIONAL FORUM locate wsif Vaginal politics Tensions and possibilities in The Vagina Monologues Susan E. Bella Susan M. Reverby b aDepartment of Sociology and Anthropology Bowdoin College 7000 College Station Brunswick ME 04011-8470 USA b Women s Studies Department Wellesley College 106 Central Street Wellesley MA 02481 USA Available online 6 July 2005 Synopsis We are feminists in our 50s who first became activists in the women s health movement when we were in our 20s. In 2002 we performed in The Vagina Monologues and participated in the 2002 V-Day College Campaign to end violence against women. We use our experiences then in the women s health movement and now in the College Campaign as a lens through which to introduce a worry about a culture of vaginas that the play s author Eve Ensler does not adequately address. Our focus is the differing ways that the body and in particular the vagina has been politicized in these two feminist eras. Our concern relates to what we see as the unproblematized tension between a celebration of the pleasures of the body and the politics that underlie the play and the movement it has spawned. We worry whether or not our sense of disquiet and recognition signals both a recapitulation of 1970s women s health politics and their limitations and a failure to learn from critiques of this form of globalized feminism. 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. . .There are problems with using the female body for feminist ends Wolff 2003 p. 415 Eve Ensler s play The Vagina Monologues TVM opens with worries I bet you re worried. I was worried. .I was worried about vaginas. I was worried about what we think about vaginas and even more worried that we didn t think about them. I was worried about my own vagina. It needed a context of other vaginas a community a culture of vaginas Ensler 2001 p. 3 . As we performed in 2002 college Corresponding .