The door to Earth House was locked this past Saturday night. As I waited outside, braving the eighth snowstorm of the semester, I had second thoughts about what I was about to do. A stranger opened the door, letting me and my friends into the kitchen. “Quiet,” we were told. “Someone is performing.” I had my monologue scrunched up in my back pocket. Students clapped at the end of the performance, as we pushed our way through the crowd into the living room.
Everyone was gathered in the house for the Pussy Pow Wow, an “underground,” word-of-mouth event organized by several members of the Connecticut College Vagina Monologues executive board. Despite not being widely publicized, students, 90 percent of whom were women, filled the living room, and spilled into the kitchen. Bodies were pressed close together — too close, perhaps — in silent reverence as peers read words they had written: words that were personal — sometimes funny, sometimes serious and, at times, intimate. The Pow Wow functioned as an open forum to allow students a chance to voice their stories and opinions surrounding gender, sexuality, race, sexual violence, bodies, and the like, inspired in part by a project from Professor Jen Manion’s History of Sexuality class last semester. The project and the Pow Wow both sought to counteract the exclusivity and rigidity of Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues, which will be performed at Conn this weekend.
Plenty of scholarship has been done surrounding the problematic aspects of the Monologues, so I won’t delve into any feminist rants here. I will say that I was impressed by the outcome of Saturday’s Pow Wow. It’s apparent that people want to share their stories, experiences, ideas and opinions, and if given a forum, they will proudly do so. While the Monologues do start discussions about these issues, they don’t allow people the chance to share personal narratives, and thus aren’t as relevant as they could be, especially to our college community. This is where the Pow Wow (and similar projects) shines: by giving a voice to the voiceless. Was the Pow Wow successful? I can’t say. I’m willing to bet that most of the performers felt a sense of empowerment after reading their words, but will those words have a ripple effect on this campus? Will these topics be discussed or simply stored away as memories of a good Saturday night?
I chose not to read my monologue. I chose to keep my words to myself that night. But I can’t decide if that was the right decision. I’m inclined to believe that any discussion is better than no discussion — that what these brave men and women did Saturday night means something, that it was worthwhile. Will the Pow Wow change the world? Probably not. But it might set a precedent for student activism on campus, and change the way we think about issues relevant to us all.
