The Vagina Monologues

“V” stands for “victory, vagina,” and “valentine.” Its four beliefs are:

1. Art has the power to transform thinking and inspire people to act.
2. Lasting social and cultural change is spread by ordinary people doing extraordinary things.
3. Local women know what their communities need and can become unstoppable leaders.
4. We must look at the intersection of class, environmental catastrophe, gender, imperialism, militarism, patriarchy, poverty, racism, and war to fully understand violence against women (176).

V-Day is a worldwide movement that brings voices to the silence that surrounds violence against women through annual productions of works by V since 1998. However, V-Day is now also a nonprofit that has raised funds and created educational materials and campaigns to bring awareness to violence against women worldwide. One Billion Rising, an annual event on Valentine’s Day that invites women who’ve experienced violence and those who stand beside them to dance, has now grown out of V-Day as well.

Following the successful production of The Vagina Monologues, the first V-Day event was held on February 14, 1998. The Vagina Monologues was performed in the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City and raised $250,000. In 2001, another benefit performance was held in Madison Square Gardens, raising $1 million.

V-Day launched a College Campaign in 1999 that has gone on to shape safer environments for women on college campuses including Home Safe, SAFER, and the Campus Accountability Project.

In 2001, V-Day launched a worldwide campaign that has since created dramatic impacts for women in Kenya, Borneo, Manila, Uganda, and prisons across the United States.

A campaign launched by V-Day called Afghanistan is Everywhere, which brought awareness to the plight of women living under the Taliban, was successful in raising $250,000 to help women and girls in Afghanistan. Because of this, V-Day began the Spotlight campaign, which concentrates on groups of women who experience violence at staggering rates—the Spotlight campaign has concentrated on Indigenous American women, the comfort women, the missing and murdered women in Juarez, and One Billion Rising.

Because the V-Day campaign has been so successful, leaders across Africa have partnered with the movement to end female genital mutilation (FGM) in their communities. V-Day has helped to establish safe houses in partnership with community leaders like Agnes Pareiyo, who worked to educate women on FGM for years prior to the opening of the safe house, which she leads with a team.

These movements also fostered the City of Joy, a center founded in 2009 where Congolese people can heal, learn, and grow despite the violence that people experience in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The City of Joy, created and led by Congolese women and men, teaches agency, community leadership, and personal development. Its Vagina Warrior program teaches women leadership skills and skills to cope with and heal from trauma. The women who go through the program then return to their communities not to survive, but to thrive and lead, thus extending its impact beyond its walls.

Until the Violence Stops, a two-week festival of art and community building, first took place in 2006 in New York City as a celebration of V-Day. Artists, writers, and thinkers contributed their time and work to the event, which also featured new pieces like Any One of Us: Words from Prison, a play featuring the voices of incarcerated women. Events like these have now been replicated in various places around the United States, and One Billion Rising has also worked to incorporate incarcerated women. V-Day celebrations and editions of The Vagina Monologues have since worked to include trans women, and the first all-trans production took place in 2004. Men, and workshops featuring men, are also a part of the V-Day movement, including “The Man Prayer,” a piece written by V for men to perform.

As part of V-Day, local artists and activists create their own works to bring awareness to sexual violence. V-Day also takes place in areas where women experience harassment, like their places of work.

Despite countless attempts to thwart V-Day and productions of The Vagina Monologues across the world, around college campuses, and in communities, V-Day persists by turning “controversy into conversations” (200).

The 10th anniversary of V-Day occurred around the same time Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. The movement grew to consider the ways marginalized communities experience violence—violence that is systemic, racial, economic, and environmental—in places like New Orleans, the Congo, and Haiti. The V-Day movement held an event in the SuperDome called “SUPERLOVE,” which raised over $700,000 to support women in the Gulf South.

This section begins with a quote from Kimberle Crenshaw, an activist and leader in intersectional feminist thought, and her quote details the power of dancing through One Billion Rising, describing the intersectional body as a site of resistance. One Billion Rising has turned into a global movement to not only speak out against violence but also move together in spite of it. What started as a series of monologues in New York City has become a global movement that crosses boundaries and tears down barriers to bring women together to end sexual and physical violence.

V-Day is on a mission to uplift women, build communities, and envision a world where women can live freely and safely.

The 10 principles of the City of Joy emphasize personal agency, community leadership, honesty, and revolution.

The Afterword is written by Monique Wilson, the director of One Billion Rising. She begins by remembering V-Day in Manila in 2013, where thousands of people danced before her for One Billion Rising. She reflects on the impact The Vagina Monologues has had in the Philippines since she brought its first production there in 2000. Wilson invited grassroots movements in the Philippines to help her stage the show, and despite the deep patriarchal beliefs and traditional notions of the Philippine people, the play was received with interest and intense debate.

At the time of the play’s production, Filipina women had no legal protection from sexual violence, and many Filipino people were not used to openly discussing the themes inherent to The Vagina Monologues. However, the play provided a space to talk about patriarchal systems stemming from colonization and Catholicism and their impact on Filipina women. The Vagina Monologues became a catalyst for large-scale social change across the Philippines, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan. Working with GABRIELA, a grassroots movement for women in the Philippines, the play changed the way people across the Philippines understood violence against women, including leading officials and women themselves. Wilson writes that there exists no equivalent word to “vagina” in the Filipino language, just a derogatory term.

The Vagina Monologues became a platform to discuss widespread systemic issues of not only violence against women but also perspectives about womanhood and femininity in the Philippines and beyond. The work Wilson and GABRIELA initiated in Asian nations through V-Day also brought issues like the comfort women to the forefront of urgent issues surrounding women. Wilson reflects on her many memories of the impact that The Vagina Monologues and grassroots women’s movements have had in her lifetime. Notably, they performed the play in front of legislators of the Philippine congress and senate, who went on to pass anti-sex-trafficking bills that were 10 years in the making.

Wilson notes the importance of The Vagina Monologues to the woman question, or “the phenomenon of the discrimination, subordination, exploitation, and oppression of women” in the Philippines and the world (219). Wilson acknowledges the critical role of the play in the transformation of Filipino society toward a more empowering future for women—women who’ve been oppressed by both colonial powers in the West as well as their own governments. She details the critical importance of art as a form of political activism and The Vagina Monologues as a catalyst for change.