Talking About “Down There”: The Politics of Publicizing the Female Body through The Vagina Monologues

Abstract

This critical reading of The Vagina Monologues examines the play's circulation within dominant discourses of public and private and considers the ways in which the play works to reconfigure the female body and body-related issues as properly public. However, this article also begins to explore the potentially essentialist and reductive nature of the play's construction of female identity.

Keywords:

• critical rhetoric
• feminism
• public and private
• body
• essentialism
• transgender