Bringing Everyone into the Fold

A post to the Quincy open list last weekend proclaimed that Saturday was the “LAST NIGHT TO CUNT IT UP!!!” The e-mail referred not to About Hair’s grand re-opening, but rather the final showing of “The Vagina Monologues.”

But there was something special about this year’s show that appealed not only to women, but to people with non-traditional gender identities—even to those without vaginas.

For the first time, Harvard’s adaptation of Eve Ensler’s play included the transgendered woman’s experience. Adopting the template of Ensler’s piece, the production company shaped their rendition to feature the experiences of Harvard students.

The final montage was an edited compilation of anonymous submissions to an online blog. It materialized on stage “without a hitch,” according to one of the directors, Catherine P. Walleck ’06.

In one of the monologues, a group of students waits for the late-night shuttle in the bitter cold. The shuttle dispatcher asks one of them, “What are the genders of the people in your party?” To avoid confusing him, she answers “Uh, we’re all female,” which infuriates her friends, among them a closeted transwoman and her “straight” girlfriend, and a transguy who would probably appear female to the shuttle driver.

“We wanted to cover a lot of areas, because trans issues are not all about violence, but about love and friendship and privacy and a bunch of other things,” Walleck writes in an e-mail.

Although those sans vaginas traditionally might feel excluded from the show, Walleck points out that transwomen have also been marginalized at discussion forums and celebrations of female sexuality.

“Transwomen should be welcome in women’s spaces,” adds Margaret C. D. Barusch ’06, who was involved in the editing process.

“My favorite moment was when I was sitting in the audience opening night, and this older gentleman came to see the show by himself and sat in the front row,” Walleck says in an e-mail. “During the trans piece, he had this enormous ear-to-ear smile on his face the entire time.”