Abstract
The first time I attended the SLU Monologues, I was particularly struck by a colleague’s performance of a monologue written by an anonymous contributor. This individual’s story took place in the 1950s when she was an undergraduate and was raped by a young man she knew. The author revealed herself after the performance and told the performer how therapeutic it was to hear someone tell her story, how it had helped her heal from her own trauma, and how she hoped others could benefit from her story. The SLU Monologues are not only about trauma; rather, they are about humanity, and what it means to be a human being. We are all storytellers. The effect of sharing one’s story can be cathartic and liberating as well as entertaining and uplifting. While some of the voices speak of painful events, still others tell about a moment of confidence, awareness, or epiphany. Psychologically and spiritually, sharing stories in a safe environment can bring people together as well as open space for healing. In this essay, I offer a discussion of the SLU Monologues’ context and logistics and an analysis of various monologues to demonstrate how this student-created and student-led project functions as grassroots activism in support of diversity on college campuses and how it serves as an impactful teaching tool that opens up space for important conversations about diversity and identity. This article only cites those monologues whose authors gave explicit permission for publication, which was collected at the time of submission of the monologues with Una. As case study, the SLU Monologues might serve as an example for stakeholders at other educational institutions and offer ideas about how to create a learning environment that supports all students, no matter the intersections of their identities.
What Are the SLU Monologues?
The SLU Monologues statement also expresses a negotiation of social justice activism techniques: We acknowledge that the dialogue we propose will not solve all problems when it comes to ignorance or hatred[;] but we hope that, by opening up a forum for such discussion, people will be less likely to attack violently those they fear or do not understand.
Toward the end of every fall semester, Una puts out a call for monologue submissions, which are then read and selected by all members of the student group. The submissions are judged based on their readability, whether they have a close focus on issues of identity, and whether they represent a diverse student body. After Una finalizes selections, their advisor within SLU’s Cross Cultural Center reads over the short-listed submissions to make sure that they all indeed contain a direct connection with identity issues and that none are too “explicit” for a Jesuit college audience. If a monologue is considered very “controversial,” a second advisor is consulted. The latter scenario only happens in rare cases. After final approval from the advisor, Una, again as a group, edits each monologue in cooperation with the author, who, ultimately, has the final say and also decides whether they want to remain anonymous, perform the piece themselves, or have a volunteer perform it for them.
The SLU Monologues are performed annually on two nights in February. In an effort to create a safe space, the program contains a trigger warning for each contribution, and volunteer counselors are present in the room in case an audience member feels the need to access immediate emotional support. After the performances, the audience is invited to engage in a “talk back” with the cast and authors to ask any questions they might have about individual monologues or the event as a whole. The donations Una collects at the event go to local organizations that offer help to women who have experienced domestic violence.
Origins and Evolution
While Una was able to present Ensler’s play off-campus every year since, the feminist students on our conservative, Jesuit campus voiced concerns about the lack of open discussions and shared stories when it comes to issues deemed “inappropriate” by the Catholic Church—especially sexuality and reproductive health. The article “12 Catholic Colleges to Host Obscene Play The Vagina Monologues This Year” on the pro-life web page Life Site offers an example of the kind of rhetoric that marks The Vagina Monologues as “obscene” and attempts (often successfully) to shame Catholic campuses into refraining from performing the play. The author claims that the play “distorts human sexuality and celebrates sinful behaviors, including lesbian activity and masturbation. By 2010, in an effort to continue tough, yet essential conversations about identities and their intersections, violence, as well as pride and achievements, Una created the SLU Monologues, two nights of stories written, performed, and discussed by students, faculty, staff, and alumni. The play and its organizers have established a powerful creative space for the SLU community to express fears, anger, hopes, and successes to push for social justice for all members of the university.
The SLU Monologues were never intended to replace The Vagina Monologues. In a continued effort to bring The Vagina Monologues back to SLU’s campus, Una has made clear in a letter to the administration that the SLU Monologues have their own unique purpose: [T]his show is getting better and better at encompassing the perspectives and contexts of a greater percentage of those in the SLU community. The SLU Monologues were always a safe space for those who felt silenced or ashamed to share their story. The space has not changed; however, the expanse of those who utilize it has.
The ultimate goal of the performances has always been to tell as many inclusive and diverse stories as possible. Only then do they represent effective diversity work. Rightfully, Una is proud of the evolution that the event has undergone so that “[h]allmarks among our pieces now include stories of religion, family, and mental health, stories of triumph and of despair, stories which have potential to reach the wider community and invite a greater number of people to participate.” While many events—feminist ones included—proclaim their intention to be intersectional, the SLU Monologues have succeeded in expanding people’s understanding and questioning of what various forms of oppression, privilege, activism, and justice look like. They present an experiential learning environment in which students exercise how to apply theory to practice; they encourage empathy, dialogue, and civic engagement; and they provide faculty and staff with valuable knowledge about how best to support students as the latter offer candid insights into their lived experiences and describe the forms of allyship they seek and need to be successful inside and outside the classroom.
The SLU Monologues draw attention to lived experiences in the community and offer the opportunity to reflect upon and, ideally, respond to imminent concerns at the school. The SLU Monologues, like The Vagina Monologues, focus extensively on all forms of abuse. “I Was a Child,” viscerally captures the self-blaming that a 13-year-old girl experiences after having been harassed by a much older man at a gas station where she had ridden her bike to buy a Slurpee: If you were a good girl, you would have worn longer shorts. If you weren’t such an impatient child, you wouldn’t have just worn your [swim]suit. I don’t give a fuck that it’s a one piece. You you you…you are such a little whore! I didn’t really even know what that meant, but I knew it was true.
Violence against women deserves much needed attention on all campuses. In addition to supporting this demand, the SLU Monologues speak to other forms of patriarchal violence such as against the queer community or ethnic minorities. “For Her Eyes Only,” for example, rejects the pervasive sexualization of lesbian love for the male gaze and pleasure. The author writes, My attraction to women sure as hell does not exist to arouse you, please you, or be about you in any way, shape, or form. I like women because I like women, because I love to love women, not because I want to make straight men happy.
Importantly for our community, the SLU Monologues also include male voices who present themselves as allies and use their influence to demand accountability on part of their peers. In “How We Say Things,” the male narrator identifies as “somewhat of a macho man;” he explains that he “was one of those guys in high school who called people fags and queer and what not as a joke without even thinking about it.” The use of such derogatory words by a straight cis-male gets people’s attention and creates, for a moment, a tense atmosphere. The monologue diffuses this friction by describing the narrator’s realization that his words are hurtful when two of his friends come out as gay. In light of the pervasiveness of homophobic and sexist language on college campuses—especially within hypermasculine spaces such as fraternities and athletic teams—such a message is far from elementary. Male voices have a high chance of reaching their peers and of encouraging them to change their behavior. For lasting change to happen on college campuses, men need to be included in feminist and diversity activism.
The SLU Monologues as Grassroots Activism
In the process of fighting for administrative support for The Vagina Monologues as well as in creating, organizing, and promoting the SLU Monologues, Una has been indispensable. The group’s call for feminist activism and its intersectional approach to bringing about change on campus greatly influence the event’s design, implementation, and effect: It is Una’s mission to address the intersection of gender, race, sexuality, culture, and oppression. We believe in equal rights between the sexes on all social, political, and economic levels. Una is a group of students determined to make SLU’s campus and the community aware of the issues that all marginalized people, and women in particular, face, including but not limited to: sexual assault, sexual harassment, economic discrimination, physical violence, international violence, racism, heterosexism, and sexism. Una maintains that violence or discrimination against one marginalized group affects all marginalized groups and thus feminism is an issue that affects all people.
Una’s feminist consciousness-raising and programming has, in the past, earned them a reputation of being a radical student group whose interests only benefit a few select cliques on campus. This has resulted in funding cuts and occasional resistance toward program ideas on the part of student governance. Through frequent collaborations with other student organizations and academic units—such as the Women’s and Gender Studies Department—and by making some adjustments to the amount and caliber of speakers to bring to campus, Una has been able to persevere financially without too many sacrifices. Despite the above-mentioned frustrations, Una has remained a vibrant organization with a substantial number of members who meet for weekly sessions to discuss academic articles, documentaries, or popular culture artefacts on current issues ranging from sexual violence to self-care to family-leave legislation. The group also organizes, among other events, Love Your Body Day and Take Back the Night. The organization as a whole and its core team (the group does not have a hierarchical leadership) are fully committed to feminist activism and change and do not shy away from confrontation.
The SLU Monologues work effectively within the environment described above as a diversity grassroots activist project. In their Prologue to Grassroots: A Field Guide for Feminist Activism, Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards define feminist activism as “consistently expressing one’s values to make the world more just” with feminism influencing that value system (p. xix). Throughout the book, the authors emphasize that feminist grassroots activism can be done by everybody, that everyday practices can be turned into activism tools if they are informed by a political consciousness, and that it does not need a protest march with thousands of participants to bring about change. Moreover, a checklist for activist art projects suggests that they need to be collaboratively made, collectively run, that they may not require training for participation, and that they are process-oriented and accessible to the wider public (p. 169).
Adhering to these characteristics of activism makes the SLU Monologues such a powerful tool for opening up space to talk about controversial topics on any campus. The people who make the SLU Monologues happen are heavily invested in creating social justice for our campus and the communities beyond its boundaries. While Una operates with feminist ideals in mind, not everyone participating or attending the Monologues identifies as feminist, and most of the authors and performers of the individual monologues certainly do not think of themselves as professional writers or actors. Una works individually with those who submit pieces; submission can be anonymous; authors can choose to perform their own monologues or have them performed by a volunteer; no performance training is required; while some monologues might be influenced by a (feminist) theoretical background, most contributions can be easily grasped by a wide audience as they are based in personal experiences.
Baumgardner and Richards mention that since their first showing on V-Day in 1995, Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues have “exposed more people to feminism than any other entity in the last decade” (p. 177). As such an incredibly successful example of feminist activism, banned on SLU’s campus, it seemed natural that Una would decide on a similar format for their own grassroots project. One of The Vagina Monologues’ main purposes is to show that the vagina is a natural body part and not something of which one should be ashamed. The SLU Monologues embrace this message and expand it by emphasizing that your sexuality, your experiences with sexual violence, your queerness, your sexual desire, your gender identity, your class and citizenship status, your disability are nothing for which you should feel shame.
Activism on college campuses is the topic of a whole chapter in Grassroots. Baumgardner and Richards deem campuses great places with the necessary infrastructure for activism (meetings spaces, creative people, etc.), but they acknowledge that “college students are…likely to need strategies for effective activism, ways to take them beyond their outrage[, to] move them toward solutions” and to overcome “‘meeting fatigue’” on the part of many students (pp. 59, 60). The authors offer advice for students to surmount the above-mentioned obstacles: (1) “build on what already exists” (p. 61), (2) have clear and realistic goals (p. 63), (3) “[w]ork with not against your administration” (p. 70; emphasis in original), but, at the same time, (4) do “not be…afraid of power” (p. 88). Una took an already popular event, The Vagina Monologues, and personalized it for their community; they worked admirably with administration to understand the resistance to The Vagina Monologues, which enabled them to avoid the same controversies with the SLU Monologues; Una’s members were fiercely prepared to push back against unfounded criticism and have not given up the fight to bring back The Vagina Monologues.
The SLU Monologues present a powerful venue for voicing outrage and for functioning as a therapeutic practice while, at the same time, making it possible to move beyond anger through reaching and educating a wide audience that might usually shy away from seeking out messages about diversity and feminism. Only a SLU monologue can create open conversation about access to emergency contraception; the performer sets the scene one “Horny Halloween” when “he grabbed me off the table spun me around and kissed me like a unicorn has never been kissed before!” While many monologues rightfully express trauma to convey essential messages, many use humor and lightheartedness to bring attention to feminist issues.
In addition to functioning as an effective form of grassroots activism, the SLU Monologues serve as a formative experiential learning moment for many students and instructors alike and thus have implications for the use of and receptiveness to social justice–focused pedagogy in classrooms across campus. The students who attend the event tend to be more comfortable with sharing personal experiences in a class setting and applying concepts and theories to their own lives. The connection of theory with praxis—a major goal for many academic fields—seems to come more easily to these students. Likewise, I have had conversations with faculty who, after having been in the audience for the Monologues, planned on making their teaching techniques more creative, communal, and reflexive. Thus, the SLU Monologues have not only become a stable part of activism on SLU’s campus, but they have also proven themselves to be an excellent pedagogical tool.
The SLU Monologues’ Pedagogical Impact
Sometimes, though, these challenges seem insurmountable as students find it hard to see the real-life implications of an experience that they, because of who they are, will never have to face. Amplifying the teaching moments of class readings and discussions, “show and tells,” documentaries, and service-learning projects, the SLU Monologues add another layer of intensity to students’ comprehension of issues discussed in a diversity context. Members of their own community sharing experiences with sexism, racism, or transphobia, or stories about the liberating power of gender-bending, push students who attend the event to take said issues more seriously and to think more deeply about their implications in their own lives and environments.
Importantly, the SLU Monologues teach audience members empathy. Oppression becomes not only understandable but tangible. Many monologues refer to the concept of oppression purposefully to make their audience more comfortable with its critical application. “Tale of an Outpatient” brings attention to discrimination against people living with a mental illness: What if I had gotten poison ivy oil on my shoes and then it touched my knee and then I went down to scratch my knee and then I touched it with my hand and then I touched my face and then it would be everywhere. Obsess, wash, repeat. Obsess, wash, repeat. Joking about mental disorders isn’t funny. It isn’t lighthearted. It isn’t a “cool” thing to say. It’s oppressive. And hurtful (emphasis mine).
The monologues make clear that discrimination is not a rare, remote occasion, but that even within SLU’s mostly privileged community people suffer. Every year after the SLU Monologues, students mentioned that they now “get it,” that feminism is not dead, that they were able to take a glimpse into the world that lies outside of their privileged bubble, that everyone should take a course focused on diversity. Likewise, monologues celebrating progress, love, and community keep students motivated in their efforts to bring about equality and inspire many to get more involved in justice-oriented student groups.
As I elaborated, having open discussions about oppression and feminism can be difficult on a Jesuit campus; and yet, it should not have to be this way. In Jesuit and Feminist Education: Intersections in Teaching and Learning for the Twenty-first Century, Jocelyn Boryczka and Elizabeth Petrino collected wonderful essays that speak to the compatibility of Jesuit and feminist education. One of these essays, Heather Hathaway, Gregory J. O’Meara, and Stephanie Quade’s “Textual Deviance: Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues and Catholic Campuses,” takes on the ban of The Vagina Monologues on several Jesuit campuses. Many of the points the authors make about how this controversial event can actually further Jesuit education are also vital to a discussion about the SLU Monologues’ pedagogical merits.
Hathaway, O’Meara, and Quade explain that Context, Experience, Reflection, Action, and Evaluation constitute the five pillars of Jesuit education in the tradition of Ignatius of Loyola. Jesuit institutions set out to train students to think critically, to interrogate norms, to use experience as a valuable epistemological tool, and to advocate for social justice (p. 229). Making sense of your own and others’ experiences presents an essential teaching tool (p. 230). While the Women’s and Gender Studies classroom embraces all of these objectives, the SLU Monologues, in particular, present a powerful space in which students get to practice the above-mentioned skills. In contrast to The Vagina Monologues, the SLU Monologues are made up of students’ own lived experiences. Their voices are heard—even if authors decide not to perform their own pieces. The Monologues encourage the audience to interrogate what they take for granted and to ask questions—especially about norms that shape their own community.
One of these ingrained norms, for example, is the goal to raise students to be “men and women for others,” which is anchored in the university’s mission. The social justice focus of the Jesuit approach to pedagogy is apparent, but so is gender duality as the only option. Monologues like “Standardization”—which asks “[w]here can I mark ‘my gender should never fit into your one-word definitions?’” in response to the author being asked to check their gender on a test—challenge students to see gender not as a binary, fixed, natural state, which liberates many to promote gender justice and equality on campus and beyond.
Consistently, students told me that they appreciated the SLU Monologues for bringing up issues that they feel uncomfortable discussing on a conservative campus or that they are prevented from bringing up at home. Such topics include especially sex, homosexuality, and losing your virginity. Many of the monologues deal with exactly those kinds of “sensitive” points for discussion. Stories like “Bitter Musings of a Virgin” and “A Case for Chastity” make it possible for students to think through these crucial concepts without censorship or judgment.
The subject in “Bitter Musings” questions patriarchal norms of young women’s sexuality: I have no idea what virginity means. But I think I’m a virgin because I’m scared, scared of giving up something that I’m not sure I really had control of in the first place. Scared of losing the only characteristic I have no chance of getting back, and scared of facing the people who are disappointed in me.
Sexuality is a recurring theme in the performances, and monologues portray it without judgment from all perspectives. The monologue in the previous section that criticized the devaluing of young women’s sexual desire is complemented by “A Case for Chastity,” which was written by a gay man and makes the case for one’s choice to not engage sexually if one truly does not want to: I want to wait for that permanent loving commitment to experience sexual intimacy. I want to wait for marriage. Some people may think I’m naïve, juvenile, or childish. Some people may think I’m a prude or a member of the morality police. I just value monogamy, commitment, and, above all else, love. Despite all this, when I came out to my parents, they told me I was a diseased polygamous whore, in so many words; that my life was filled with orgies and fueled by lust. I would die young and never know love.
The Monologues often provide audience members with the language to describe their own experiences, which creates great catalysts for class discussion, for example, about the hypersexualization of queer people and the common disregard of same-sex abuse. Naturally, discomfort with elements of the presented stories constitutes an important part of these discussions. From day one of the semester, I encouraged students not to shy away from discomfort, but to embrace it as an essential learning device; many valued the opportunity to talk out loud and try to understand what is causing their unease after having attended a show.
In recent years, students have been especially touched by a set of recurring themes. They mentioned that they are hugely grateful for the chance to gain awareness and be exposed to different perspectives on forms of oppression, varying types of harassment, issues of mental illness, and the idea of sexuality as a spectrum. The possibility to hear voices from within the transgender community has been a big influence on students. “To Be Heard,” for example, recounts the dangers in a trans person’s daily life, which cisgender students are spared to have to consider due to their privilege. The performance begins with the statement that when I was 20, I was finally regaining the language I lost when I had said to my mom at age 8: “I don’t think I’m a real girl like a girl is supposed to be”…and was slammed into therapy to get “fixed.” I walked into the women’s bathroom today. I do that a lot. I shouldn’t be there. [points at self] I’m a transman! But I don’t pass, come across as male enough to use the men’s without danger of harm. [appeal to audience] But what am I supposed to do?
The monologue “Hi, Mom” about the pain of telling your mother that you are transgender allows the audience to connect a human face with rumors they might have heard about trans people. The performer addresses their mother in an emotional appeal: Mom, I love you. I strive to make you proud in most everything I do.…But I no longer want to be your daughter. I don’t want to be a wife. I don’t want to be a sister. I don’t want to be a girlfriend. I don’t want to be a mother. All I’ve ever wanted is to be your son. And to be a husband. And a brother. And a boyfriend. And a daddy.
In creating space for open conversations about diversity and identity, the SLU Monologues normalize empathy, acceptance, and critical thinking both in and outside of class. They can positively influence students’ willingness to participate in class discussion and make them less resistant to discussing important issues that are deemed too personal or too political. Beyond the classroom, the SLU Monologues have constructively shaped how student success personnel—such as counselors, academic coaches, and advisors—approach supporting students as the event has taught them about the issues a diverse student body deals with and created fruitful dialogue about how best to be allies to students who live with intersecting identities and resulting forms of oppression. From a pedagogical perspective, I cannot stress enough the SLU Monologues’ validity and strength and their impact on our social and intellectual community.
Conclusion
The SLU Monologues, instead, prioritize emphasizing community and solidarity and providing a space to have tough conversations about issues that tend to get ignored. Inspired by the SLU Monologues, students at Lindenwood University, a Presbyterian university in St. Charles, MO, created the LU Monologues in 2013 to express student concerns in a conservative environment. As an effective combination of student-led feminist pedagogy and activism, the SLU Monologues could become a powerful model for offering a platform to hear oppressed voices on university campuses across the United States.
