V-Day Blog Archive

Letter from Juárez

by Mariana Katzarova

Esther Chavez holds the weeping girl in her arms and chants the words, as if to convince herself that they are true: “It’s really wonderful, my dear girl. You are alive. You could’ve been one of them.” Esther looks over the girl’s shoulder toward the row of pink crosses placed on the edge of a ditch, where eight raped and mutilated bodies of young girls, the same age as Rosaisela, the girl in Esther’s arms, were dumped by their killers in 2001.

Rosaisela Lascano is only 16. She was attacked and raped on December 30 by a man who left her for dead in the desert. But she survived. Now she is pregnant with the baby from the rape. There, in the middle of a rubbish dump, once a cotton field, where the last windowless boxes of the maquiladoras meet open desert, Rosaisela whispers her story. Like thousands of others, she came from the poverty of the south to look for a better life in Ciudad Juarez with its 380 maquilas (US- and European-owned plants, using Mexico’s cheap labor and paying young women less than $5 a day) built along the US border. Ciudad Juarez, a city of 1.3 million, lies just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas.

The man dragged Rosaisela by her hair, while hitting her all over her body. Then he raped her and left her for dead among the old tires and broken bottles. She crawled home many hours later, fearful for her life, avoiding people and houses. Her parents took her to the police the next day. The police were barely interested. The only one who offered to help Rosaisela was Esther Chavez–a beautiful, ever energetic and always elegant 70-year-old woman who established Casa Amiga about ten years ago as the first and only crisis center in Juarez to provide help to the victims of sexual abuse and domestic violence.

According to the authorities, some 370 young women have been found murdered since 1993, and a further seventy are still missing, although Mexican women’s groups say the figure is over 400. Many victims were sexually assaulted, their bodies mutilated, strangled and dumped in the desert near Juarez. And not a single perpetrator has been brought to justice for these murders.

Three federal police agents wearing dark sunglasses and looking uncomfortable are standing near the eight crosses. They say their bosses ordered them to guard the ditch because they’re afraid the same killers may come back and dump another body there.

It is Valentine’s Day and a big protest march, organized by Eve Ensler and the V-Day movement and supported by Amnesty International, has brought between 5,000 and 7,000 people from Ciudad Juarez and El Paso to march through the streets of Juarez. They are demanding an end to the murders of women and girls. We all meet on the Lerdo Bridge, which connects the two cities, chanting “Ni Una Mas” (not one more), “No Estan Solas” (you are not alone) and screaming “Justicia” (justice), while carrying black balloons and makeshift placards. For the past several years Ensler has called Valentine’s Day “V-Day” and used her award-winning play The Vagina Monologues to organize actions, raise funds and create awareness of antiviolence causes around the world. Ensler believes that one person with a vision and the conviction to stop violence in her community is enough. “We need to realize that the Earth is one body,” she says, “and if we don’t start seeing it as one body, we are all going to die. Because we are dependent on each part of this body to live. So when a woman in the south is beaten, I can’t walk–my feet are being crushed. And when a woman in the north is raped, I can’t think–my brain is being attacked.”

So who is killing the poor young women and girls of Juarez? And why, after more than ten years, do the killings continue? Some of the murders are believed to be the work of serial killers or drug gangs, linked to the powerful Juarez drug cartel. Others link the murders to an organ-trafficking network. Still others say that the perpetrators come from among some 700 sex offenders who live in El Paso and often visit Juarez. Another theory is that a number of the mutilated bodies found in the desert bear the signs of snuff films, the type of violent porn films in which someone is really killed at the end. The inability of the local authorities to stop the murders has convinced many of possible police complicity in the crimes.

Oscar Maynez, a former chief of forensics for the Chihuahua state police, told me he quit two years ago when he found police planting evidence in one of the cases. In recent years, under increased public pressure, the authorities have been eager to show that the murders in Juarez have been solved. A series of arrests were made, but the murders continue. All the suspects detained by the police claim they were tortured to confess to the murders. “We all know that the state police work for the traffickers,” said Maynez. “None of the people detained for the murders are responsible, in my opinion. The real murderers are people with no limits. I think they are a highly organized group with political connections and some connection to the police.”

Juarez looks to me like the war zones I know–like Chechnya, Kosovo, Bosnia. There is the same casualization of violence, the same sense of despair, the same blurred line between right and wrong, the same wild packs of hungry street dogs roaming the city, the same sense of doom.

The maquilas are now moving out of Juarez, looking forward to even cheaper labor in China. In the meantime, under increased international pressure, President Vicente Fox has appointed two women to deal with the investigations and prosecutions in Juarez but has not yet given them funds, resources or trained staff. Mexican feminist Marcela Lagarde has invented a word for the situation in Juarez: femicide.

Somebody with resources, power and impunity continues to kill young poor girls in Juarez. “But now they know–the world is watching them,” says Ensler, “and we will keep coming back.”

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When Caprice and Meera Get Together

by Karen Bartlett

How did a play about gynaecology, rape and genital mutilation become a worldwide smash hit? Karen Bartlett on the rise of a phenomenon and the unique pulling power of its originator

Eve Ensler stands on stage, a tiny figure in the huge arena that is Madison Square Garden, usually home to America’s biggest and most masculine sporting triumphs. It is February 2001 and she has just finished a benefit performance of her play The Vagina Monologues. Around her, stacked to the roof, are 18,000 people, mostly women. Taking part that night are Oprah Winfrey, Jane Fonda, Isabella Rossellini and Gloria Steinem.

The Vagina Monologues has run its usual course. Everyone has laughed at the funny anecdotes about trips to the gynaecologist and about what, if your vagina got dressed, it might wear. Most have been shocked at the monologue about female genital mutilation; some cried at the parts about women who have, for many reasons, been shamed. A monologue about a woman from Bosnia who hasbeen raped as an act of war brings about such a sense of pain and desecration that somebody in the audience collapses.

“But haven’t we heard it all before?” asks a wizened veteran of the feminist movement. Vaginas, clitoris empowerment workshops, long earnest group sessions involving lying on yoga mats and trying to peer at yourself with a hand mirror. Listened to the lecture, read the article in Cosmo, don’t need the bad trip back to the 1970s. And yet, just this month, MPs including Joan Ruddock, Caroline Spelman, Sandra Gidley and Oona King, as well as the Home Office minister Caroline Flint, were performing in Monologues alongside Jerry Hall, before a packed audience at the Criterion Theatre, London, that included Meera Syal and Anita Roddick. It was the third British “V-Day” benefit performance – and this time, even Cherie Blair sent a message of support. What is different about The Vagina Monologues? Is it the wit of the old lady who went swimming in a vaginal flood with Burt Reynolds? The way it has of creeping inside you with the little girl whose “coochie snorcher” got hurt by a lot of men but then redeemed, in very politically incorrect fashion, by an older woman? Is it the simple joy of the repressed eccentric who came to realise that her vagina was “better than the Grand Canyon”?

Or is it that, at the end of it all, that night in Madison Square Garden, Ensler asks everyone to stand up who has ever been beaten or abused? It’s a huge leap of faith, and she knows it. A huge empty space in which the first heads bob up, then more. Then more. Then many. And that’s the moment when you understand why The Vagina Monologues is such a phenomenon.

It wasn’t always clear that The Vagina Monologues would be a runaway hit. Yet the obscure play performed off-Broadway had women flocking to Ensler’s dressing room night after night to share their experiences – often terrible. So many came, in fact, that Ensler founded a movement, “V-Day”, on the back of her play, to campaign for an end to violence against women. The campaign, unlikely and unexpected, started to sweep across the world, taking in every country, attracting millions of women, speaking the unspeakable. Banned in China, attacked by various private religious colleges in the United States, but always compelling and wildly popular, the play raised more money to stop violence against women than almost every other project run by women.

Eight years ago, Ensler was 43, a middle-class Jewish woman from suburban Scarsdale, New York, with a bad childhood behind her; a writer who had not found her niche; a political activist who had spent anonymous years chaining herself to railings in support of the usual liberal causes – homeless women, minorities, the poor. Today, Ensler is a heroine of college campuses everywhere, invited to the White House, handed numerous awards, including an honorary degree by her alma mater, Middlebury.

There is something undeniably more emotive in hearing the bad news about violence against women from Ensler, up there on stage – angry and direct – rather than in a dry, soft-spoken presentation from some female junior minister. With Ensler, you feel it’s personal. Other groups may have worked tirelessly against the abuse of women in Afghanistan, but it was Ensler’s relationship with Rawa (the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan) that brought it to public attention. It was V-Day that recently took the leader of an Iraqi women’s group to the US to talk about the effect of the war there, and V-Day, with Amnesty International, that organised lastmonth’s well-publicised march on Juarez to protest the mass murder of women there. Other films may have been made and articles written, but it was V-Day that pulled off the half-page photo in the Guardian of Jane Fonda defiantly marching for justice in Mexico.

Even though she is often to be found in the midst of world celebrities such as Fonda or Oprah, Ensler always draws your gaze: there is an angry energy there, a determination to make the most of the moment; it is easy to imagine her, young in 1970s New York, all politics, outrage and hustle. But there is also something despairing about her, this woman who once said she had watched the film Looking for Mr Goodbar, in which Diane Keaton struggles with her demons only to end up murdered by a man she picks up in a singles bar, and thought “lucky her”, to be out of the misery, and the world. In The Vagina Monologues Ensler talks without hesitation about being sexually abused as a child, refuses to be labelled by acknowledging that in her life she has been attracted to men and women, and is first to admit to troubled years of drinking and drug-taking in her past. This vulnerable openness, which, together with anger and allure, fills The Vagina Monologues, saves Ensler from being swallowed up in the frenzy of becoming an icon and being turned into a monster.

The question about V-Day as a movement is whether, for all its razzmatazz, it can translate the passion it generates into real political change. It can draw celebrity, but can it draw power?

At a grass-roots level, where V-Day channels most of its funding, it can claim considerable success. Among other achievements, V-Day built a safe house for women fleeing female genital mutilation in Kenya, and supplied the camera to film the Taliban’s execution of an Afghan woman – footage now infamous across the world.

On the broader canvas the transition has been more patchy. The “1 per cent campaign” to devote 1 per cent of US defence spending to stopping violence against women has – not surprisingly – found little favour on Capitol Hill, nor has it attracted much wider attention in the US at large. [V-Day Correction: The 1% Campaign was launched to V-Day organizers in the U.S. in 2003 and was not presented to lawmakers. The 1% Campaign has evolved into “V Is For Vote” to be launched in May 2004] Equally, there has yet to be a woman taking part of whom real political achievement is expected. The line-up at the London event on 8 March was impressive, but would have been more so with anYvette Cooper, a Beverley Hughes or a Patricia Hewitt. Extracts from The Vagina Monologues were performed by some female MPs at the Labour Party conference in 2002, but it was Eve Ensler’s impassioned speech afterwards that captivated the audience.

Without a doubt, it has been Ensler’s force of personality that accounts for V-Day’s meteoric rise. Does it make sense that a political movement should be based on a play full of fake orgasms and vaginas dressed up in feather boas? No, but Ensler never speaks from her head to ours: rather, she is all heart and passion, past hurt and future hope. To a generation desperate for a respite from managerial politics, this proves an electrifying message. No wonder so many of the women who file into a performance of Monologues sign up to its campaign as they file out.

Warmer and funnier than a Gloria Steinem or a Germaine Greer – and definitely more attractive in every sense than a Betty Friedan or Andrea Dworkin – EveEnsler speaks to the big picture. It is the longer-term challenge for V-Day to prove that it is both bigger than Ensler, and capable of not living and dying in the light of the celebrities who currently flock to it.

This article first appeared in the New Statesman. For the latest in current and cultural affairs subscribe to the New Statesman print edition

Vagina Monologues Hits India Trouble

By Jayshree Bajoria

The women’s stage production The Vagina Monologues has been banned from the southern Indian city of Madras.

The current version of the production, staged earlier this week in Bombay, stars Hollywood actresses Jane Fonda and Marisa Tomei.

The show, which has been a controversial sell-out around the world, explores female sexuality and strength through individual women telling their stories through monologues.

Madras police refused permission to stage the show after finding certain portions of the script “objectionable” and warning it could pose a threat to public order.

It has already faced bans in other parts of the world, including China and Malaysia.

The play was staged in Pakistan in an invitation-only show last October.

Pakistani actress Ayesha Alam, who is a member of the troupe that is staging the production in India, told BBC News Online about the problems of showing it in her own country.

“It was very difficult to perform the Monologues in Pakistan. It even got discussed in the national assembly. Many thought that the play was promoting promiscuity, was against our culture and our religion,” said Ms Alam.

Stirring stories

The play might have hit an obstacle in Madras, but is likely to roll on famously to other cities if the audience reaction to its first performance in the western city of Bombay, also know as Mumbai, is any indication.

The new production with Jane Fonda and Marisa Tomei has been providing Bombay audiences with an unforgettable evening of stirring stories and scintillating performances.

Singer Usha Uthup and Jane Fonda

Staged in a plush party room of a luxury hotel in the city, it has showcased some uninhibited and honest stories of women and their vaginas and problems of violence they have faced.

The troupe included the woman behind the Vagina Monologues, playwright Eve Ensler, and a number of Pakistani actresses who were launching a campaign to stop violence against women called V-day.

Giving her show an Indian spin, Ms Ensler read out an excerpt called ‘Jaadi’ (Fat) from her new story ‘The Good Body’. The story is based on her conversation with an obese Indian woman trying to lose weight.

“I have been interviewing women in India about their bodies. I performed it as a way to show my appreciation for Indian women,” she said.

Jane Fonda also read out a story to an enthralled audience.

She told the audience that when she was contacted to take part in the show three years ago, she had refused saying she “had enough problems”.

But when she saw Ms Ensler perform the Monologues in New York, “it changed my life,” Fonda said.

“I was a feminist. Well I thought I was totally a feminist. What I discovered was that I was a cerebral feminist and watching the Monologues brought [my feminism] from my head into my body. The play had a big effect on my life, and I decided to become part of the global movement [on women’s rights].”

‘Men should watch the play’

Marisa Tomei was an instant hit with the audiences when she told a story about “my short skirt”. Ms Ensler gave the audience a glimpse into the spirit of the play.

Former model and actress Pooja Bedi was among the celebrities in Bombay

The audience swayed, cheered, clapped and danced to songs sung by two Indian singers, and gave the show a standing ovation when it ended.

A man in the audience, Nandu Bhagwat, who danced to the songs in the production, said more men should watch the play.

“I am glad women are coming out to speak. I hope other men would think what I thought while watching the play – women are not merely sex objects,” he said.

The Indian performers were happy about the response.

“We’ve had all full house shows and standing ovations. The play has touched a chord in everyone’s heart,” said Dolly Thakore.

The production will now move to Delhi.

V-Day in the City

by Priya Ramani

I can just visualise him, Chennai’s top cop R. Natraj who has decided he will block the staging of The Vagina Monologues at least in his city. There he is, sipping just-right filter coffee — his wife Nirmala probably prepares the fresh decoction every morning. Suprabhatam blasts through the speakers, and for some reason he’s thinking about a recent speech he gave at founding day celebrations of the Stenographer’s Guild. Stenography is a living art and will not die in spite of technological advances like computers, he had predicted to resounding applause.

People who irritate him include errant autorickshaw drivers (he’s determined to make them behave) and legendary bandit Veerappan. Like countless other predecessors, when he took over as police commissioner in November, he vowed that efforts to nab Veerappan would show results soon. He’s proud that fatal road accidents in Chennai have gone down, thanks to the strict police force.

A new addition to the irritants list is Eve Ensler and her controversial play that, to be fair to Natraj, has already been banned in various countries including China and Malaysia.

In Delhi they wanted to sidestep the word ‘‘vagina’’ and refer to it as a V-Day celebration instead. But unfortunately for Chennai’s women, Natraj seems to have been offended by the concept of V-Day itself. In India, the police commissioner has the power to clear all public performances in his city and to say no if he finds any objectionable content.

So what if The Monologues had won awards and been translated into over 35 languages. One quick glance and Natraj was sure Chennai would not be able to handle this brutally frank series of outpourings by women and about women. About the moans that come out of women. (Why should Chennai’s women have any use for a Big-O orchestra ranging from the diva moan to the doggie moan, aren’t they soundless anyway?) What possible requirement could there be for the observations on female sexuality vs male sexuality (‘‘who needs a handgun when you have a sub-machine gun’’) and for the frank discussions on the only organ in the human body dedicated to human pleasure.

In the Chennai police, there was nobody to explain to Natraj that The Vagina Monologues is more than a book that studies female sexuality and strength. It also exposes the violations that we endure throughout the world. It’s a movement against rape, battery and incest, a movement that has raised more than $20 million in the six years of its existence.

Who would tell him that Ensler’s image of the urban Indian woman in a “salwar-kameez with Nike shoes and a terrific sense of humour” was way more accurate than his outdated understanding of what women should see and hear.

And so Natraj decided that in the land of Lord Venkateswara, this other V-day would clearly be a no-no.

V for victory, V for Vagina

http://www.mid-day.com/entertainment/news/2004/march/78202.htm

By Udita Jhunjhunwala

Jane Fonda’s blue turquoise top had ‘Vertigo’ emblazoned across it in silver sequin. If only writer Eve Ensler had worn her hot pink ‘Vagina Warrior’ ski cap too.

But that’s a small omission when you have Hollywood actresses Jane Fonda and Marisa Tomei with writer of The Vagina Monologues Eve Ensler at the Taj Mahal Hotel on International Women’s Day promoting V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls.

On a travelling visit to India till March 20, the showpiece of V-Day and its activities are the special performances of Eve Ensler’s cult hit play The Vagina Monologues staged here by Mahabanoo Mody Kotwal. So coveted was the event that even Aishwarya Rai was struggling to get a ticket for last night’s show.

Speaking about their involvement with the movement and their visit to India, Marisa Tomei (seen in My Cousin Vinny and The Guru) and Jane Fonda (Barbarella, The China Syndrome) said that they were both here on Ensler’s invitation. “It is Eve’s decision where to spend International Women’s Day,” said Fonda who is on her second visit to India. “We spent it in Islamabad last year,” said Ensler.

“Mahabanoo seems to have done well with the play here and we wanted to honour the vagina warrior experience in India.”

The show in Mumbai included one fresh piece — Jadi (fat). “I interviewed these women two years ago and this piece is a part of my new work, The Good Body,” said Ensler. “I was moved by how older Indian women love their bodies. They said to me, ‘without jadi we cannot hold our saris up’.

We live in a society with images of skinny women, but I was reading the Kamasutra the other night, and there are no skinny women there. They are all voluptuous and round.”

For Marisa Tomei, though The Guru is her most recent brush with Indian settings and themes, her earlier experience was working with Mira Nair 10 years ago (My Own Country). “But this is my first visit to India and I will go see Mira’s mother when I am in Delhi,” said the Oscar winning actress. Jane Fonda made her visit to India in 1968, a very different India to that of 2004. “I’m very different myself,” says Fonda. “And when you change, a place does seem different.”

All three women practice yoga, Ensler is a practising Buddhist and greatly influenced by Gandhi, and all have found an awakening of their true feminism through the Vagina Monologues — a play about women and, as the title says, that very private part of a woman’s body that men, and women, shy away from.

“Jane says that I am obsessed with the notion of living with ambiguity. Well, violence is the mechanism that destroys ambiguity.

The degree of violence to women globally is obscene — rape, murder, battery, infanticide,” said Ensler explaining the V-Day cause. “We stand in solidarity with women of India who’ve been fighting for years against violence. The V-Day movement is about empowering women and holding them sacred.”

Fonda, for her part, displayed an honesty that our Indian actresses would benefit from observing. Said the acclaimed actress, fitness guru and icon, “I am a successful, independent woman. I have been married three times and yet in each of these marriages, I would often silence my own voice. I was a feminist in my head but in my private life, I tried to please my man.”

Watching Ensler’s performance off-Broadway in New York persuaded both these actresses to become vagina warriors. “It was a personal revolution for me,” said Tomei.

“A liberation and a journey to the source of my power. I was scared of doing it at first.” Fonda too balked at the idea when she first read the play. “I’ve got enough problems of my own, I thought. But after seeing Eve’s performance I was moved from my head to my body. It changed my life and I wanted to spread the message that violence against women should not happen.”

While stage actors have embraced The Vagina Monologues performances, Bollywood has so far not stood up for it. When asked why this was, Kotwal said, “Some say they did think of doing it. Some said they’d do only some parts. But nobody from Bollywood supported us. If they had, though this would not have been the play it is.”

Ensler is more metaphorical. “We are all dining at a huge table shaped like a vagina. I just think some people have not come to dinner yet. I trust that at some point in time they’ll find themselves, and they’ll come.”

Let’s wait and see how long it is before the Bollywood sisterhood feels brave enough to say V is for Vagina.

“Staging it in Pakistan was tough’

http://www.mid-day.com/entertainment/news/2004/march/78203.htm

“My mother-in-law came to see it wearing a hijaab. While my mother wept after the readings. And my husband, along with the other men, considered it to be pathbreaking,” says Islamabad-based activist Nighat Rizvi who staged Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues for the first time in Pakistan last year.

“It was tough staging it in Pakistan. People thought we were crazy and it would spell disaster but everything went off well. In fact it was discussed in the National Assembly but it was too late to do anything as the show had already been performed by then.”

Rizvi is in Mumbai along with Karachi-based actress Ayeshah Alam to participate in the Asian premiere of Ensler’s Necessary Targets which debuted in Bosnia in 1996 and ran off Broadway in New York in 2002.

The play consists of readings and celebrates women working towards peace. The cast of this private reading to be held at the Taj President tomorrow also includes Mahabanoo Mody Kotwal, Avantika Akerkar along with special guests Ensler and Jane Fonda.

The idea for Necessary Targets came during V Day’s (an offshoot of The Vagina Monologues; a global movement to end violence against women and girls) travels to Afghanistan and Pakistan in March 2003. The time Ensler spent in refugee camps in Bosnia during the war also served as in inspiration for it.

Incidentally Kotwal’s Poor Box Productions is planning to stage Necessary Targets as a play next year. Even though it has war as it setting; its universal themes of women and war will strike a chord anywhere, they feel.

Rizvi, as one of the first woman in Pakistan to campaign publicly on Aids, is used to taking risks. She is part of Amal, an NGO working on gender rights, reproductive heath, HIV/AIDS and human development.

“When I saw The Vagina Monologues in London, I was deeply moved. I knew this had to be staged in Pakistan to highlight women’s issues and create awareness. I got in touch with the V Day group via the Internet and they were saying, ‘Hello? you want to stage it in Pakistan’?” says Rizvi who was undeterred and went ahead with the show.

Besides Rizvi and Alam, there were top Pakistani actresses Nadia Jamil and Samina Pirzada at the reading of The Vagina Monologues at the Marriott in Islamabad.

“We had localised the plays with lots of Urdu and Punjabi words thrown in,” says Alam. They talked about recent local incidents, about women being burnt by their husbands or in-laws for failing to bear sons or not being submissive.

“We had a women only show in Islamabad where Ensler participated while the show at the Royal Rodale at Karachi had a mixed audience,” says Alam, who is the ex-wife of Brian O’Connell of the Junoon music group.

Though Alam has been to Mumbai several times before, it is the first for Rizvi. “Our visit was coordinated by V Day’s special representative Hizbaaq Osman who is also here. It is fun to explore new cities and to meet other women. There is this special bonding and we cherish it,” say the duo.

Vagina Is Not a Dirty Word

http://inhome.rediff.com/movies/2004/mar/08eve.htm

By Archana Masih

Jane Fonda and Marisa Tomei had never met Mahabanoo Mody-Kotwal. But tonight they will perform with her in Eve Ensler’s widely acclaimed play The Vagina Monologues in Mumbai.

Fonda and Tomei arrived in the city last night. Their performance takes place on Women’s Day and is part of V-Day, which is a global movement to stop violence against girls and women. The V in V-Day stands for Victory, Valentine and Vagina.

“People think vagina is a dirty word. It’s not,” says producer-performer Kotwal. “The play is about separate, powerful stories. It’s about changing mindsets.”

Based on Ensler’s interviews with over 200 women, the play salutes female sexuality and reveals the violations that women experience in their daily lives.

Ensler will also be in Mumbai tonight for the performance. Her new monologue called Jaadi [fat] which she wrote based on her conversation with an obese woman trying to lose weight in a gym in India, will be premiered at the show.

Produced by Kotwal and her Columbus, Ohio-based son Kaizaad, the cast includes Mahabanoo, theatre actor Dolly Thakore, Avantika Akerkar, television actor Jayati Bhatia and Sonali Mahimtura Sachdev.

Oscar winners Fonda and Tomei will be doing one or two monologues. Fonda performed for V-Day in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan last year. Tomei was the first celebrity to support the movement after it began in 1998, says Kaizaad Kotwal.

More than 200 stars have acted the Obie-award winning play so far. Cate Blanchett, Kate Winslet, Glenn Close, Oprah Winfrey, Winona Ryder, Susan Sarandon, Alanis Morissette, Calista Flockhart, Isabella Rossellini, Salma Hayek, Kylie Minogue and Meera Syal with a host of other women have played roles over the years.

Kotwal first saw the play in Atlanta, Georgia in November 2001 after Kaizaad had bought her a ticket. “When I saw it, I wanted to do it,” she says just before a rehearsal in her apartment.

She met Ensler in America, obtained performance rights and staged it in Mumbai last year. But it was far from easy.

“Many theatres refused,” she recalls, “many actors did not want to do it because of the title but I came across some committed actors.”

A stage actress who has acted in Shirley Valentine, the Naseerudin Shah-directed A Romance for Ruby, Steel Magnolias, BBC radio’s adaptation of Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy and Merchant-Ivory’s Cotton Mary, Kotwal says it is ironic that people do not say the word ‘vagina’ as if it were taboo in a country with a sexually forward thinking past.

“We have the most beautiful, erotic temples in Khajuraho and the Kama Sutra. I think men should see this play more than women. I tell people to listen to these stories and listen with respect.”

There is a certain hypocrisy about progressive ideas, people are willing to see thinly veiled vaginas in fashion shows but are unwilling to discuss larger issues, says Kaizaad.

The producers feel The Vagina Monologues tells stories that embody the spirit of women, ‘the essence of womankind. That very essence that is assaulted and rarely celebrated.’

The Indian cast, Kotwal says are confident and are not under any kind of pressure because of Fonda and Tomei’s presence.

Thakore, one of the casting directors for the Oscar-winning Gandhi, has acted in plays like Death of a Salesman, A Streetcar Named Desire and Gaslight.

Akerkar returned to Mumbai after spending many years in the US and has acted in Ashes To Ashes, Lunch Girls and Whatever You Say.

Bhatia, a student of Ebrahim Alkazi, has acted in Going Solo Part I, Mahatma vs Gandhi and in television serials Kahani Ghar Ghar Ki and Tu Tu Mein Mein.

Sachdev, an orthodontist decided to become an actor. She is the narrator or sutradhar of the play and has acted in The Witness.

In the rehearsal, they excel.

“Where are Jane and Marisa?” chuckles a jovial Thakore as she breezes in, telling the girls that she is looking svelte because she has to match up with the duo from Hollywood.

The women then sit down beside each other and begin Vaginaspeak.

The Vagina Monologues will be staged at the Tata Theatre in Mumbai on March 8 at 7 pm.

‘Vagina Monologues’ Becoming College Phenomenon

By Mary Beth Marklein

The Vagina Monologues made its name in 1997 as an off-Broadway play that explores female sexuality and strength through a series of stories that are at times funny, sad, graphic or horrifying.

But over the years, the production has metamorphosed into something of a phenomenon. And nowhere, perhaps, has the play been embraced — or opposed — more passionately than on college campuses.

College groups represented 66 of the 70 organizers staging productions in 1999, the first year playwright Eve Ensler made it available for benefits shows. This year, more than 650 of the estimated 1,100 groups planning productions worldwide are affiliated with a college.

“We have never tried to get anyone to do The Vagina Monologues,” Ensler says. “It just took off.”

Now, it’s not just a play. With violence against women a key Monologues theme, groups that put on a benefit performance donate proceeds to anti-violence charities such as rape crisis centers and women’s shelters. This week, during the high season of February and March, the non-profit V-Day anti-violence group that Ensler founded, is helping human rights group Amnesty International launch a campaign to end violence against women.

Students often put their own stamp on the campaign. At the University of Notre Dame this year, an open-mike session enabled students to share their stories of sexual abuse. Organizers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison invited students to send valentines to campus housing officials highlighting unsafe dorms. And students at the University of California-Berkeley used the opportunity to raise awareness of violence against its community of transgenders, people whose identity does not conform to the gender they were assigned at birth.

But with its emotionally charged subject matter and graphic language, the productions also attract controversy. The play unfolds through a series of monologues that address issues ranging from sexual assault to sexual pleasure. In one piece, a Bosnian woman recounts her rape; another catalogs the various sounds women make during sex. The word vagina is used 132 times.

“Theater seems to be a really great way to reach people,” says Elizabeth Ellcessor, 22, a senior at Georgetown University, where the play ran last weekend for the sixth year in a row. “It really gets people talking.”

Others say the message is potentially damaging to young women. The content “guarantees a certain level of interest among many college students,” Cate Brumley, 20, a junior at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash., wrote in a recent column for the Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative non-profit group. But among other things, she writes, the play also “reduces the full potential of a human person” to a single body part and “encourages college women to be sexually promiscuous.”

The title alone created a quandary this year for administrators at College of the Sequoias, a community college in Visalia, Calif. Worried about ruffling feathers during a bond campaign, the campus staged the play but chose not to sponsor it. An anonymous donor paid campus theater rental costs.

And in a twist this year, about 10 women, duct tape across their mouths, handed out fliers before the start of the University of Oregon production to protest what they said was an under-representation of minorities, large women and lesbians in the cast.

The most high-profile complaints, though, have come from conservative Catholics. At Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, about a half-dozen protesters, including students, parents and alumni, held a prayer vigil outside the campus production last month. The Cardinal Newman Society, a national group that calls the production an “assault on young peoples’ minds and morals,” ran an ad in some editions of USA TODAY recently urging readers to demand that presidents of Catholic colleges prohibit it. So far, 16 have said they would not support a production, though several cancellations were unrelated to the society’s campaign. In some cases, students have moved the play off campus.

But most of the 27 Catholic schools where the play is scheduled to run this year take a position similar to Georgetown’s. “It’s important for students to be able to engage in dialog,” says Georgetown spokeswoman Julie Green Bataille. “It doesn’t mean we specifically endorse the way in which the views are presented in this particular case but that the student has the right to do it.”

Some Catholics say they support the anti-violence message — just not the messenger.

“Universities and colleges can choose much better avenues than making the point with vulgarity,” says the Very Rev. David M. O’Connell, president of Catholic University, Washington, D.C. He says he would not allow the play on his campus.

But Lindsey Horvath, 21, a senior at the University of Notre Dame who has participated in her campus production for three years, says the church “calls us to act, and we found this vehicle to act and respond to these problems.”

Two years ago, the group raised $5,000 for local anti-violence charities; last year $6,000. This year, she estimates raising even more.

“I question these people who say there are better options. What are they?” Horvath says. “I don’t think I need an alternative.”

Related Articles and Statements:

“At Religious Universities, Disputes Over Faith and Academic Freedom” (New York Times)

http://www.vday.org/contents/vday/press/media/0602183

V-Day Update On Providence College Banning Of “The Vagina Monologues”

http://www.vday.org/contents/vday/press/release/0601211

Letter from the president of Loyola University, New Orleans- Kevin Wildes, S.J.

14 Feb 2005
http://www.vday.org/contents/vday/resistance/loyola

Resistance

http://www.vday.org/resistance

Eve Ensler and Amnesty International March on Juarez to Stop the Murder of Young Women

http://villagevoice.com/issues/0408/chute.php

By Hillary Chute

February 14, Juarez, Mexico-“Ni Una Mas”-“not one more”-was the impassioned rallying cry this Valentine’s Day as activist groups from the U.S. and Mexico converged on this gritty border city to protest the brutal killings of more than 370 women in Juarez and the nearby state capital, Chihuahua City, since 1993. Early Saturday, a rapt crowd of 500-plus men, women, and children, sharing seats and crammed against the walls, spontaneously chanted “not one more” and “you’re not alone” at the local university as Mexican professor Marcela Lagarde addressed the “feminicido” that has plagued Chihuahua State for the past decade.

Between 5,000 and 7,000 anti-violence protestors then gathered at the Lerdo Bridge separating Texas and Mexico and marched down Juarez’s central Lerdo Avenue, lined with wedding-dress stores and small restaurants. Screaming “justicia,” protestors carried black balloons, blurry black-and-white photocopies of missing and murdered women, and decorated dresses hanging on tall pink crosses. Even a group of fraternity brothers from University of Texas-El Paso-decked out in T-shirts reading “men of character”-marched with an enormous canvas of handprints and the declaration “These hands don’t hurt.”

At the front was Vagina Monologues author Eve Ensler, whose international non-profit V-Day co-sponsored the march with Amnesty International, which last year issued a detailed report damning the quality of the criminal investigations in Juarez and Chihuahua City. Accompanying Ensler was press-magnet Jane Fonda and other so-called “Very Important Vaginas”: actors Sally Field and Christine Lahti, PBS president Pat Mitchell, Lifetime CEO and president Carole Black, and Congresswomen Jan Schakowsky (Illinois) and Hilda Solis (California). Solis wants to pass House Resolution 466, which supports the multilateral creation of a DNA database in Chihuahua state.

In the U.S., the right wing hopes to smear John Kerry for being within five feet of Fonda in 1970; for most in Juarez, the simple fact that Fonda, whoever she is, is a famous person agitating to draw attention to the murdered women is a hopeful sign. “I am rich, I am famous, I am white, and I have a daughter and a granddaughter,” Fonda declared to a group of storming reporters. “If they were murdered or disappeared, I know the authorities would work very hard to find out who kidnapped them.” Fonda concluded her comments by admonishing the press: “Why did it take international movie stars to turn up for you to be here?”

A little over ten years ago, according to an Amnesty Now article, the number of women murdered in Juarez-a city of roughly 1.3 million-averaged three a year. In 1993, the number skyrocketed to three a month. Many of these murders are classified by the police as “situational,” as in domestic violence and drug- or gang-related violence, even though the similarities between the murders clearly point to a larger trend. The mutilated bodies of young, poor women are dumped in and at the outskirts of the city. The average age of the victims is 16. At least one-third of them work in the city’s maquiladoras, or foreign assembly plants. More than one-third of the women are raped before they are killed, and most of their bodies show signs of captivity and torture. Once seen as a problem in the rough, crime-ridden Juarez alone, the murders have now spread to Chihuahua City.

Rumors about the killings identify its perpetrators variously as the state police, an international organ-trafficking ring, Satanists, organized-crime factions, serial killers from the U.S., a group of local serial killers, and the Mexican government.

So who is killing the women? At an emotional press conference in the crammed lobby of the Juarez’s modest Monte Carlo hotel on Friday, one mother of a murdered girl answered, “We don’t know. Why do they leave them like this [mutilated]? What are they trying to erase? . . . I am sure the state police of Chihuahua know what happened to these girls. I want to know. That’s a mother’s right.” Amnesty’s report declares that “the failure of the competent authorities to take action to investigate these crimes, whether through indifference, lack of will, or inability, has been blatant.” Alma Guillermoprieto, who wrote about the killings forThe New Yorker this past fall, sees “active collusion” by the Chihuahua police as a logical possibility, and “active indifference” as the least-incriminating explanation. The police deny all involvement.

The murder of women in Chihuahua state is certainly a socio-economic political issue. After NAFTA, workers from poor villages poured into Juarez, and the rise in violence in 1993 coincides with the boom of the maquiladora economy. On Saturday, the group La Mujer Obrera distributed leaflets avowing that the murders “are the consequences of a global economy that continues to promote the deterioration of the social fabric on the border.” Multinational corporations take advantage of loose environmental regulations and cheap Mexican labor-maquiladora workers are paid less than $5 a day. U.S.-run factories in Juarez-including Thomson/RCA, General Electric, Ford, and Dupont-have done little to ensure the safety of their female workers: girls have disappeared in the waste-grounds adjacent to factories, which are often unlit. Private companies have rejected the idea that they should pay for security for their workers. Claudia Ivette Gonzalez disappeared after her assembly plant turned her away for arriving four minutes late; she was found in 2001 in a ditch with seven other young women. Her employer, the Lear Corporation, stated that the company did not need to provide its workers with extra security because her murder didn’t happen on Lear property.

Saturday’s protest ended with a free performance of the Vagina Monologues in Spanish and English, featuring the Mexican actors Lilia Aragon, Marinitia Escobedo, and Laura Flores-and Fonda, Field, and Lahti-at a packed local dance hall. Ensler made the important gesture of including monologues (in addition to standards like “Bob,” about a vagina-friendly man) that spoke directly to international violence against women. There was a long, moving performance in Spanish about the rape and assassination of women in Kosovo. And Field, occasionally crying, did a piece that focused on spousal acid burning in Islamabad and female disfigurement from bombing in Iraq before she ended with the situation in Juarez. American folk singer Holly Near-leading a chant for “ni una mas”-performed a song for Juarez that also targeted violence in Chile and Guatemala.

Global in focus, V-Day and Amnesty assert that the Juarez crimes are a human-rights scandal. And so while groups like Women in White, a government-sponsored activist party-and even a selection of victim’s mothers-were said to oppose the protest in part on the grounds that the vocal agitating lacked dignity, Ensler made savvy choices: pointing to the worldwide problem of gender violence, she didn’t single out Juarez for blame.

The Vagina Monologues clearly inspired and often amused its audience. Fonda played a woman who regards her vagina distantly as a “red leather couch” or a “mink-lined muffler,” and another piece ran the gamut of orgasm types: “mariachi,” “diva,” “triple,” etc. But the divide between the monologues’ occasionally playful content and the issue of unsolved murder at times felt awkward. While the crowd for the most part whooped and roared enthusiastically throughout the show, a group of three mothers whom I recognized from the previous day’s press conference-sitting in the front row, placards of their daughters’ faces hanging over their chests-silently stood up and walked out mid-way through.

The mothers remain optimistic, but not overly so. In October, Vincente Fox appointed a special federal commissioner, Maria Guadalupe Morfin, to monitor the state’s work, and last month, he appointed a special federal prosecutor, Maria Lopez Urbina, to run her own investigations. But for these appointments to be effective, they have to be well funded, and there’s no promise yet that Fox won’t be as effectively neglectful of the situation in Juarez as he has been since his election. Asked at the press conference if she had hope in Lopez, one mother replied, simply, “We hope to have hope in her.” Ensler, for her part, declared Saturday V-day for “victory”: the march was the largest in 10 years of anti-violence activism in the city. As one lawyer for several mothers stated, “This is the only thing that has pressured the government.” Ensler vowed, “We will keep coming back to Juarez until women are free and safe.”

V-Day on the Newstand This Week: People, Marie Claire, CosmoGirl, Lifetime magazine and More

See this week’s PEOPLE magazine (February 16 issue) for a story on Eve, p. 119.

MARIE CLAIRE’s March issue features Eve’s piece on Juarez, “The City Of Murdered Women,” p. 106

GLAMOUR’s March issue for a story on Esther Chavez and Juarez with mention of the V-Day & Amnesty International March on Juarez and V-Day’s Spotlight on Juarez , p. 145.

COSMOGirl’s March issue for a feature on Eve by V-Day college activist Molly Kawachi, p. 120

Also, LIFETIME’s March issue for a piece on our documentary, UNTIL THE VIOLENCE STOPS

WALL Street Journal on Vosges Aztec Collection in support of V-Day and Juarez. See www.wsj.com (subscription)

Associated Press on Bobbi Brown V-Day Lip palette – http://www.knoxnews.com/kns/style/article/0,1406,KNS_316_2629628,00.html