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.

Eve Ensler's goal in writing The Vagina Monologues was to generate a dialogue regarding women's sexuality to counter the silence that pervades the patriarchal culture that they inhabit. To achieve this goal, Ensler constructs two ideologies—one grounded in patriarchy and another supposedly grounded in female agency and dialogue—to reveal the problems within the current ideology in hopes that her audience will adopt her new ideology and resolve the detrimental silence women endure. To evaluate its success, this study utilizes an eclectic approach—comprised of constitutive rhetoric, second persona, third persona, and bell hooks' rhetorical options—to determine if the play's content encourages the dialogue Ensler desires. / Master of Arts

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