After 20 years, “The Vagina Monologues” is showing its age.
To keep up with the times and to address legalities that come with talking about sexual violence on federally funded campuses, Cal Poly’s version of the monologues is being revamped and changed altogether. These changes include integrating more stories of women of color, transgender women and queer women, and barring monologues dealing with sexual assault violence entirely.
“The Vagina Monologues,” which had been shown at Cal Poly for several years, doesn’t allow for much creative license, another reason for its facelift.
“Some of the (limitations) were really petty, like: no intermission,” said Tammie Velasquez, coordinator for the Gender Equity Center (GEC). “And you can’t change the script, which is really difficult because the script was written 20 years ago. So what was really progressive and inclusive 20 years ago isn’t as progressive now.”
Big changes
So the GEC, in conjunction with Safer, is attempting something new this year. “The Vagina Monologues” has been dropped, and will be replaced by “Original Women’s Narratives,” or OWN.
The production will likely be a combination of student-submitted monologues, poems and songs, as well as works from outside media, according to Velasquez. Submissions were due on Feb. 12, and the play will take place some time midway through spring quarter.
With the name change comes a great shift in the play’s message. Because of a number of legal obstacles, student submissions which contained themes of sexual violence were
not considered.
While there will be at least one monologue regarding sexual violence, it is set to be created by three student assistants at Safer who are involved in the production “on behalf of what they see at Safer,” according to Velasquez. But otherwise, there will be no student-submitted monologues related to sexual violence.
One reason for this change is because GEC employees are mandated reporters, meaning they have to keep track of and report possibilities of abuse, according to Velasquez. Therefore, a student could submit something personal dealing with sexual violence thinking it’ll be anonymous, but because GEC employees are mandated reporters, the GEC must report it.
“I don’t want a student thinking they can submit something anonymously and then all of a sudden it’s not going to be anonymous anymore … It’s a much bigger issue than we were prepared to handle,” Velasquez said.
Others involved with OWN said that moving away from the conversation of sexual violence would protect the audience.
“It might be for the best,” said English senior Taylor Steinbeck, OWN’s student director. “I wouldn’t want to create a space in which audience members would feel as though they’re being brought to a traumatic experience. Because we would want what an audience member to understand what a survivor has gone through … But at the same time, it could be particularly traumatic for someone to relive it who has gone through it.”
But some who participated in “The Vagina Monologues” in the past said that while Ensler’s script is outdated, the conversations about sexual violence that it helped create
were vital.
“It made me a lot more comfortable with my body and being able to say ‘vagina’ in the first place,” English senior Karlee Benner said. “You can’t talk about your body or your experiences as a woman if you’re not allowed to talk about sexual violence, because it’s really pertinent to the subject … It’s very important, if not the
most important.”
The revolutionary episodic play, written by Eve Ensler, focused on creating an open forum about women’s issues, especially those related to sexual violence. The production of the campaign coincides with and often acts as a fundraiser for the V-Day Campaign — a nonprofit organization started by Ensler in order to combat sexual violence.
Originally, the OWN submission guidelines barred women from submitting anything on the topic of sexual violence because of “confidentiality issues” with Title IX compliance. The page said that themes of “sexual violence (sexual assault, harassment, stalking, rape, intimate partner violence, molestation, etc.) are not allowed through this platform.”
Title IX is a piece of legislation from 1972 that ended formal gender discrimination in education. Since then, it has been amended to add that federally funded schools must address gender-based violence if it impacts a student’s ability to participate in education or extracurriculars. The school can only report the incident if they have authority over the person committing the violence or the area where the violence took place, according to the American Civil Liberties Union’s website.
However, Title IX does not directly address the situation of students openly addressing their past experiences that had to do with sexual violence.
After Cal Poly’s Title IX officials were questioned by a Mustang News reporter, the submission page changed dramatically to explain that “submissions that include disclosures of sexual harassment, sexual misconduct, dating violence, domestic violence and stalking, will not initiate formal University (sic) action under Title IX requirements, with the exception of a disclosure of child abuse or imminent danger.”
Still, the GEC decided not to accept sexual violence-related submissions because of their employees’ responsibilities as mandated reporters. Stephanie Jarrett, Cal Poly’s Title IX deputy coordinator, wrote in an email that she noticed there had been a miscommunication in Title IX’s reach after reviewing
the subsection.
Though Velasquez added that she hopes the GEC will make room for pieces on sexual violence, she also mentioned that it isn’t necessarily the job of the Gender Equity Center to bring that conversation to light.
“It’s about social justice,” Velasquez said. “That’s really what the Cross Cultural (Centers) is aimed at working on … Campus justice and advocacy.”