49 pages • 1 hour read
Eve EnslerThe Vagina Monologues
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1996A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Pages 92-122Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “Spotlight Monologues”
Part 2, Page 92 Summary: “Spotlight Monologues”
A brief introduction to the “Spotlight Monologues” describes them as a collection of monologues that detail specific V-Day spotlights or circumstances where women were “totally at risk” (92).
Part 2, Pages 93-98 Summary: “The Memory of Her Face”
Dedicated to Esther, the monologue begins in Islamabad, Pakistan, and details a woman’s experience with domestic violence resulting in disfiguration from acid. The next section takes place in Juarez, Mexico, where 300 women are kidnapped and mutilated down to the bone.
Part 2, Pages 99-104 Summary: “Under the Burqa”
This monologue is dedicated to Zoya and is preceded by a brief disclaimer that the piece is about women being forced to wear a burqa, rather than commentary on the burqa as a religious symbol for many women across the world.
The narrator speaks from underneath the burqa and describes how hot and oppressive both the burqa and gender expectations are that surround her. She suffocates under the weight of the burqa as her husband is shot and she loses her children. Through the experience, she loses her identity, feeling trapped by and caged by her oppression and garment.
Part 2, Pages 105-112 Summary: “They Beat the Girl out of My Boy…or so They Tried”
This monologue is dedicated to Calpernia and Andrea. The narrator is a trans woman who details her experience growing up and into her womanhood. As a child, she longed for a vagina and experienced violence because, though she was assigned male at birth, she has never belonged to male culture. She wears lipstick and paints her nails and is beaten up for it. She tries to fit her assigned gender and becomes a Marine but runs away to communities that embrace her. She begins her transition and feels right once she gets her vagina. But when she falls in love, she is still tormented by violence, as her boyfriend is beaten to death simply for loving her. A brief note following the monologue indicates that the piece was compiled from interviews with multiple American trans women.
Part 2, Pages 113-122 Summary: “Crooked Braid”
This monologue is dedicated to the women of the Oglala Lakota Nation on the Pine Ridge Reservation, whose stories informed the monologue. The speaker describes her experience with generational domestic violence, first from her husband. He has beaten her near death multiple times for 18 years. Seeking revenge, she braids his hair crookedly. It makes her happy to watch him walk with a crooked braid. When he cheats on her, she cuts it off after he passes out from drinking and leaves him for three years. When her son grows up, he beats his wife as well and calls his mother, regretful and suicidal. The narrator ends by addressing the sanctioned colonial violence that results in generational trauma, saying, “They took our land. They took our ways. They took our men. We want them back” (120).
Part 2, Pages 92-122 Analysis
The monologues in Pages 92-122 return, thematically, to the ways Patriarchal Systems Perpetuate Violence Against Women through monologues that expose violence facilitated through religious, colonial, sexist, and racist power structures. Specifically, the “Spotlight Monologues” address the experiences of women whose voices were not represented in the original Vagina Monologues, including women in the global South and Middle East, Indigenous American women, and trans women. By including these stories, V connects the monologues more overtly with her larger goal of eradicating violence against all women.
In “The Memory of Her Face” and “Under the Burqa,” there is an emphasis not only on the victims and perpetrators of brutal violence but also on those who ignore it. The former exposes the brutality of acid attacks in Pakistan, a type of gender-based violence that causes lifelong effects due to severe chemical burns. The monologue begins with the lines, “They all know something terrible / Was going to happen” (93), foreshadowing the woman’s gruesome fate and the erasure of her visage. After the monologue segues to the mutilation of 300 women who were murdered and whose bodies were left on the El Paso/Juárez border, the final stanza connects the Islamabad and Juarez narratives, beginning and ending with, “I tried to turn away” (97). The speaker of “Under the Burqa” similarly implicates bystanders in her oppression, ending her monologue with “imagine you can see me […] you would know me” (102). Each monologue reiterates the personhood of the women facing oppression and the ways that men attempt to erase their faces and personhood through violence.
Other monologues in this section highlight women’s attempts to fight back against their oppressors, only to be thwarted again by patriarchal violence instilled through cultural values—in these cases, in the United States. The narrator of “They Beat the Girl out of My Boy…or so They Tried,” a trans woman finds joy and feels like “a wrong was righted” after transitioning (110), but her boyfriend is beaten to death for dating her. The speaker of “Crooked Braid” seizes a small amount of power through revenge as she attempts to humiliate her abusive husband by braiding his hair crooked and, later, cutting it off, but at the end of her monologue, she wrestles with the intergenerational nature of the violence she endured as she watches her son perpetuate it in his own marriage. Significantly, both trans women and Indigenous women in the United States experience significant violence that is largely ignored and even perpetuated by systems meant to protect women. These monologues serve to bring awareness to institutional, cultural systems of oppression and violence and the fact that they’re global issues.
