Thesis (M.A.I.S.)--Oregon State University, 2008. / Printout. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 106-113). Also available on the World Wide Web.

Thesis (M.A.)--Humboldt State University, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 77-80). Also available via Humboldt Digital Scholar.

Thesis advisor: Caroline Bicks / In the last ten years, Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues has morphed from a successful off-Broadway production into an activist movement that fosters fundraising productions of the play by community and campus groups in almost every country. In this thesis, I examine how the ‘body stories’ told by actual women made it to community stages all over the world through a series of translations: first, how Ensler poetically/theatrically interprets their stories; second, how the monologic form (and the current multiple-actor form) of the play affects the meaning of those stories; third, projecting how the audience reacts to those stories; and last, suggesting possibilities for broadening the audience’s experience into community discussion and social change. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2010. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English Honors Program. / Discipline: College Honors Program. / Discipline: English.

This dissertation explores how recent feminist authors uses their literature to create, sustain, and expand the feminist movement through their creation of communities and readerships. This project consists of four case studies, each of which examines how a feminist author represents feminist identity, where she locates herself in relation to the mainstream marketplace, which strategies she uses to circulate her representation, and what forms of small and large feminist communities she is able to create. To develop this analysis of feminist literary public culture, I focus on playwright Eve Ensler and her work with the V-Day movement, novelist Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez and her expansion of the chick lit genre, poet Lorna Dee Cervantes and her online small press, and the members of spoken word group Sister Spit and their traveling road show. These individual case studies, taken as a whole, speak to the ways that feminist authors are engaging mainstream and feminist readers in ways that create and energize feminist communities. / text

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