Chinese Feminisms and the Vagina Monologues (Elements in Women Theatre Makers)

This Element focuses on three Chinese productions of The Vagina Monologues (TVM, 1996), a radical-feminist play by the North American artist and activist Eve Ensler: Yin Dao Du Bai (The Vagina Monologues, 2003), Yin Dao Zhi Dao (Vagina's Way, 2013), and Dao Yin (Saying Vagina, 2021). Each production was staged in and informed by the changing landscape of Chinese feminism: from 2003 to the early 2010s, the making of TVM was a process of exploring the subject position of an autonomous citizen, but from 2015, feminist theatre making had to contend with gains being eroded by state neoliberalism, an issue reflected in the third performance, Dao Yin (2021). Drawing on this historical analysis, in the fifth and final section, the author proposes the concept of 'collapsed feminisms' to argue that Chinese feminist theatres from 2003 to 2021 staged an extremely complicated scene where all these feminisms overlapped and 'collapsed' together.