The Minnesota Daily: “The Vibrator Play” was originally written and published by playwright Sarah Ruhl in 2009.
This production is directed by Kate Powers, who came to the University last fall to teach a course on women in theater. An all-female crew has been putting the show together since spring.
3 comments:
Theatre is an excellent medium to discuss topics like this one as it allows for people to start with their experiences in watching the play and then move onto the larger themes and how they interact within the play but also with life today. Also theatre is a very public and expressionate art form and by bringing the private conversations of sexuality and pleasure into it, these women are inherently making these otherwise taboo structures public. Empowering people is one of the most difficult things to do seeing as everyone is different and needs different things in order to feel comfortable in what they are doing and knowing what they want, but a vocabulary is an excellent way to start off this revolution. Like one of the students said in the article, people are expected to know everything that is going to happen and everything that they want, but in reality that is almost never the case. How could you possibly be able to explain what you like if you don’t even have words for it?
This was stated so well. I loved the discussion about having the vocabulary to take control of your body and experience. If you don’t have the vocabulary or even understand the topic, you can’t make informed decisions about anything. Sex is no different, but the US is very puritanical in many ways and the way we deal with sex is not always the healthiest.
I read a really interesting article recently (I think on FB) about a woman who was born in Czechoslovakia, moved to Sweden when she was growing up, spent the first part of adulthood in France, and is now in America. She said that she has experienced many different ways that these different cultures deal with women. In Czexhoslovikia, women were obviously subservient to men. In Sweden, everyone was an equal and women had power to choose which men they would bestow favors on. In France, women had secret power and sex was all about manipulation. In America, however, women are expected to be everything, but hide sexuality because it is a little shameful.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/10/opinion/sunday/paulina-porizkova-america-feminist.html
I think this is an incredibly cool concept for a show to be based around, especially since this is history that most people, including women, do not know about. When we learned about it in my body politics class, no one in my class, which consists of eighteen women and two men, had ever heard about this history before. The vibrator was basically used a tool for rape when it was invented. When women resisted having sex with their husbands, or shirked their "maternal duties" in any way, they were declared to be hysterical and were sent to psychotherapy where operations like this were performed on them. The idea behind vibrator therapy was that by forcing women to orgasm, it would solve their hysterical reproductive issues. I think this play accomplishes two major things - educating people about the history of the vibrator, which is an incredibly interesting and troubling history, and creating a sex positive tone that involves and promotes open discussion of vibrators.
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