In recent years, women’s issues have become a popular topic on the Chinese Internet and in popular culture. From “Weibo Feminism” to feminist films and TV dramas like Her Story and Flourished Peony, from women’s variety shows such as Sisters Who Make Waves and Hear Her to women’s talk shows like First Person Plural, and from feminist book lists featuring translations of Chizuko Ueno’s works to the rise of female stand-up comedians who highlight women’s experiences, women’s issues are enjoying a growing presence in Chinese society.
But this surge also coincided with the arrests of the “Feminist Five,” the Tangshan restaurant attack, the Xuzhou chained woman incident, and the arrest of Huang Xueqin. Additionally, the space for feminist organizing has significantly narrowed: beyond state-affiliated institutions like the All-China Women’s Federation, whose operational scope is limited, independent feminist organizations have become very difficult to establish and maintain. China also lacks academic research and quantitative analysis of women’s economic and political status and the protection of women’s fundamental rights.
Thus, a paradoxical situation emerges: as the discussion of women’s issues gains more clicks and views on the Chinese Internet, the space for women’s rights advocacy is diminishing. We can see a parallel in the twenty-plus-year history of The Vagina Monologues in China. Since its Chinese-language premiere in 2003, the play has experienced a shift from mainstream acceptance, marked by extensive media coverage and official discussion (including a special segment on CCTV’s “Green Apples, Red Apples” program featuring the play’s creative team and performers), to its eventual erasure from the public sphere and transformation into underground subculture. The play’s initial adaptation, production, and performance, along with the audience’s responses and society’s reactions, have largely faded from China’s public memory. If we want to restore this continuity of memory, endeavor, and connection, it is time for us to revisit the Chinese version of The Vagina Monologues and the documentary The Vagina Monologues – Stories Behind the Scenes.
Written by American playwright Eve Ensler and premiered on Broadway in 1996, The Vagina Monologues was based on interviews with over 200 women from diverse cultures and backgrounds, including many who were affected by the Bosnian War. Translated into at least 50 languages and performed in over 140 countries, the play became a popular performance routine worldwide for the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.
In 2003, Ai Xiaoming, a professor of Chinese language and literature at Sun Yat-sen University and head of the Gender Education Forum, organized the first Chinese-language performance of The Vagina Monologues in China. Students and faculty added their own interpretation of local experiences and incorporated examples of gender discrimination in China. A student choreographed the modern dance “Abandoned Babies,” and the performers wrote new monologues titled “The First Period” and “Moaning.” Directed by Ai Xiaoming, the performance was staged at the Guangzhou Museum of Art on December 7, 2003. The performance was recorded and subsequently shown at many Chinese universities.
The documentary Behind the Scenes of The Vagina Monologues, co-produced by Hu Jie and Ai Xiaoming, captures the story behind the 2003 premiere. It documents the planning process, the social and political context, audience responses, public discussions, and societal reactions. The documentary includes interviews with the production team, performers (mostly Sun Yat-sen University faculty and students), their families and partners, audience members (with a focus on men), and participants in public forums, such as the Academic Conference on the Protection of Women’s Rights and Interests in Beijing, a screening at the Guangdong Museum of Art, a showing at the Panyu Migrant Workers Cultural Service Office, and the CCTV Education Channel’s “Green Apples, Red Apples” program.
The creators of the documentary recorded both onstage and behind-the-scenes moments, documenting a significant event within the context of China’s emerging gender equality movement. It highlights the participants’ actions and choices, the integration of Chinese women’s experiences into the play, the challenges women faced from families and society (the film includes a scene where a women’s rights advocate is criticized by her young daughter for being too radical, a reversal of roles in typical narratives), and the incremental progress in women’s rights advocacy.
Film still from “Moaning” in The Vagina Monologues (Performance at Sun Yat-sen University).
Nowadays, however, the play has been effectively erased from the Chinese Internet. Clips are absent from major Chinese video platforms like Bilibili, Douyin, and Kuaishou, while discussions are minimal on social media platforms like Weibo. Searches on these platforms yield only scattered results, primarily concerning productions outside China or a 2019 rehearsal by the China Academy of Art’s Xiang Shan Drama Club. On Weibo, discussions on The Vagina Monologues appeared the most between 2013 and 2018 (Weibo only became popular in the 2010s), but with only a few posts. Since 2018, The Vagina Monologues has been effectively banned, with zero discussions and reads under its designated topic. A ticket posted on Weibo by a woman in Wenzhou revealed that the play’s title was altered to The Female Monologues. “Vagina,” the theme and the core of the play, was replaced by “female.” A direct, specific bodily narrative that only belongs to women was substituted with a generalized label with a generalized word that erases the play’s original intent.
The original title was not accidental. The vagina, a symbol of life’s origin, is also a site of profound vulnerability and violation. While the male penis is often associated with sovereignty, the vagina is frequently viewed as a site of intrusion, representing a loss of bodily autonomy. The reason The Vagina Monologues should not be replaced by The Female Monologues is because the vagina is directly connected to a woman’s body, and the most direct way to advocate for women’s rights is to fight for the rights to their own bodies and the rights to their own vaginas.
From forcible rape to ligation due to the One Child Policy, from being ripped open during childbirth to being invaded with the speculum during checkups, the vagina, the source of life, the reproductive organ revered in early human history, is also the most trampled, invaded, and violated part of the body. The right to the vagina is a fundamental human right, the right to be free from fear, the right to be free from the fear of rape, and the right to be free from the arbitrary violation of one’s body.
The shift from The Vagina Monologues to The Female Monologues also reflects a broader trend in which feminist narratives survive in China today: we are allowed to talk about women, but not their vaginas; we are allowed to discuss women’s experiences, but only within the confines of Internet trends; we are free to talk nonstop about how beautiful women are and how special and noteworthy their experiences are, but we cannot advocate for the vagina’s rights or know how women in China advocated for their vaginas’ rights twenty years ago. If both the vagina and the vagina’s experiences are unmentionable, are women’s experiences really mentionable?
The fear of the vagina and the fear of The Vagina Monologues are not only because the vagina is a reproductive organ and because sex remains taboo or sensitive in most cultures throughout the world, but also because the performance of The Vagina Monologues is itself a social movement and a political revolt based on the precariousness of life, what Judith Butler calls “the force of nonviolence” and the power of vulnerability.
When we embrace the precariousness of life, the precariousness of the vagina, and refuse to despise the pain of being deprived of any possibility of life (the vagina itself is a possibility of life), those “bodies that matter” become the very source of political dynamism. The collective viewing of The Vagina Monologues is in fact a collective viewing of the dynamism of the female body, a viewing of the dynamism of life, and a public embrace of vulnerability, as the vagina and the theater are both political arenas. And the vagina with its own monologues can create and exhibit vibrant means of political resistance.
Although the social impact of The Vagina Monologues from 2003 is largely absent from the Chinese Internet today, China has passed its first national anti-domestic violence legislation in 2015 and incorporated anti-sexual harassment provisions into the Civil Code in 2021. However, we usually do not associate China’s limited progress in fighting domestic violence and sexual harassment with the premiere of The Vagina Monologues because such a connection is obfuscated by historical erasure–very few Chinese people know about the premiere in 2003 and how it inspired public discussion and change.
The pressure of authoritarianism, the erosion of public space, and our addiction to the Internet all make it increasingly difficult for us to make connections and build communities in the physical world. Due to the fragmentation of our public memory, we often find it difficult to connect with people who lived through history, such as people like Ai Xiaoming and her work from two decades ago. Thus, we are prone to the trap of nihilism and the feeling of powerlessness.
That is why action begins with the reconstruction of our memory because memory allows us to connect with those who have experienced history before us, to position ourselves in a long timeline of human endeavor, and to realize that we are neither lonely nor powerless–we are in fact inheriting so much strength from those who made history.