Queerness, Disability, and The Vagina Monologues

This paper questions the connection between vaginas and feminist embodiment in The Vagina Monologues and considers how the text both challenges and reinscribes (albeit unintentionally) systems of patriarchy, compulsory heterosexuality, and able-ism. I use the Intersex Society of North America’s critique as a point of departure and argue that the text offers theorists and activists in feminist, queer, and disability communities an opportunity to understand how power operates in both dominant discourses that degrade vaginas and strategies of feminist resistance that seek to reclaim and celebrate them. The “naming ” of sex is an act of domination and compulsion, an institutionalized performative that both creates and legislates social reality by requiring the discursive/perceptual construction of bodies in accord with principles of sexual difference. —Judith Butler, Gender Trouble At a lecture at Vassar College, Wittig was asked whethe