Eve Ensler is not your typical activist. Funny, warm and seemingly devoid of cynicism, the 61-year-old feminist immediately strikes you as a magnetic person. She uses words like “energy” and “art” — rather than hammering on about politics or law — when describing her campaign to end violence against women. Yet she talks with a persuasive intimacy that draws you into her crusade.
It takes a charismatic personality like Ensler’s to do what she has accomplished — getting Hollywood A-listers such as Whoopi Goldberg, Glenn Close and Susan Sarandon to perform in a play about vaginas, initiating a global anti-violence movement and calling on one billion people to dance.
Ironically, she went through a lot of trauma in order to get to where she is today. Born into a wealthy family in New York City, Ensler was sexually and physically abused by her father when she was a child. The experience inevitably became the engine that drives her campaign against what she believes to be a profoundly violent patriarchal society.
Photo courtesy of The Garden of Hope Foundation
“I think so much patriarchy has robbed us of even knowing who we are. It makes us afraid, traumatized and quiet… I think women’s empowerment is really a way to come back to your body. You have access to your dreams and yearnings and you are not afraid to voice it; not afraid to lay responsibility to people who have harmed you,” Ensler says.
On the invitation of the Garden of Hope Foundation (勵馨基金會), Ensler made her debut visit to Taiwan last month where she took part in a conference on women’s rights, attended by leaders of women’s organizations from Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Mongolia, India and the Philippines. She also participated in a One Billion Rising (OBR) event held in Taipei, in which there was drumming and dancing with local politicians, including Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲).
SPEAKING UP
Photo courtesy of The Garden of Hope Foundation
In 1996, following interviews she conducted with more than 200 women who lined up to tell their stories about “violence, rape, incest and sexual harassment” and “secrets and buried things that women never told anyone and need to be told,” Ensler, then a minor playwright, wrote The Vagina Monologues. The episodic play composed of monologues about women’s experiences has since been translated into multiple languages and performed around the world.
The wild success of her play gave Ensler access to power and influence. Along with other activists, Ensler launched V-Day in 1998, an international effort that raises funds for women’s needs through benefit performances of The Vagina Monologues by local groups worldwide.
According to Ensler, V-Day has raised over US$100 million over the past 17 years, and funded local groups, projects and resource centers for women in countries such as Egypt, Iraq, Haiti and Kenya.
Photo courtesy of The Garden of Hope Foundation
DANCING YOUR PROBLEMS AWAY
In 2012, Ensler launched the OBR campaign to stop violence against women worldwide. It started with an ambitiously simple, almost quixotic idea. According to a UN estimate, one in three women on the planet will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime — that is, one billion women.
On Valentine’s Day in 2013, Ensler called on one billion people worldwide to get out on the streets to dance and join forces in the name of putting an end to sexual violence.
Photo courtesy of The Garden of Hope Foundation
Ensler simply believes that dancing is an easy and enjoyable thing to do, making it an effective way to invite everyone into the movement, including men.
“One of the problems with violence against women is somehow it gets defined as a women’s issue. It turns out that we are not raping or beating ourselves. Men are involved in it. I think the fact that it has not been a human issue, or men’s issue, is one of the problems we have,” says Ensler.
GLOBAL SISTERHOOD?
Photo courtesy of The Garden of Hope Foundation
Ensler has received her fair share of criticism from other feminists. A frequent critique is that by claiming that all women are equally subject to sexual violence and should unite through common needs, the white feminist assumption erases cultural and ethnic differences, as well as differences informed by historical and socio-political reasons.
This is a point that Ensler seems to be fully aware of. She says that campaigns like OBR are merely catalysts which can be used by local organizations or activists to address issues specific to their own countries.
“Everybody can take this energy, adapt it and use it in any way that serves them,” she adds.
Photo courtesy of The Garden of Hope Foundation
In 2011, Ensler co-founded the City of Joy in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a sanctuary for women who survived unimaginable atrocities — including gang-rape by mercenaries and sexual violations by fathers and sons forced at gunpoint. The center helps survivors get their lives back on track and become leaders in their own communities. This is achieved through a series of programs such as theater and dance workshops, physical education and leadership training.
“The whole basis of City of Joy is taking trauma and turning it into power and leadership,” Ensler says.
BODILY MATTER
As a global activist with great influence, Ensler often sounds more like a new-age therapist. Instead of discussing political and economic problems, she believes that it is the bodily connection with oneself and others, not rational thinking, that will lead to changes. Ensler repeatedly returns to her battle with uterine cancer as a trigger to reconnect to her body. Dancing is a way of transforming bodily trauma and releasing the traumatic energy for women who dissociate from their bodies after being violated in order to tolerate what has been done to them.
“As a survivor of incest and brutality, what I learn is that so much of what happened to me happened to my body. I was forced to leave my body at a very young age because it was too painful here. I didn’t want to live with the memory and the feeling that were generated in my body,” she says.
LETTING GO
Ensler is at her most lucid when she talks not as a hardline activist but as a survivor. During her speech in Taipei last month, Ensler was asked whether she had restored her relationship with her father before he passed away. She said she hadn’t, but she did restore the relationship with the father inside herself.
“I think the mandate to forgive is pressure for women. I think when you stop feeling as if you are anyone’s victim, that feeling of being a victim dissolves. It is a form of forgiveness because it releases you forever from your perpetrator,” she says.
Ensler adds, “If I had any dream of what I would want my father to do, I wouldn’t dream my father to go to prison. I would dream that my father sits in front of me, and he would weep for the feelings he caused in my young self, and that he takes responsibility for it through his tears and pain.”
May 6 to May 12 Those who follow the Chinese-language news may have noticed the usage of the term zhuge (豬哥, literally ‘pig brother,’ a male pig raised for breeding purposes) in reports concerning the ongoing #Metoo scandal in the entertainment industry. The term’s modern connotations can range from womanizer or lecher to sexual predator, but it once referred to an important rural trade. Until the 1970s, it was a common sight to see a breeder herding a single “zhuge” down a rustic path with a bamboo whip, often traveling large distances over rugged terrain to service local families. Not only
Ahead of incoming president William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20 there appear to be signs that he is signaling to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and that the Chinese side is also signaling to the Taiwan side. This raises a lot of questions, including what is the CCP up to, who are they signaling to, what are they signaling, how with the various actors in Taiwan respond and where this could ultimately go. In the last column, published on May 2, we examined the curious case of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) heavyweight Tseng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) — currently vice premier
The last time Mrs Hsieh came to Cihu Park in Taoyuan was almost 50 years ago, on a school trip to the grave of Taiwan’s recently deceased dictator. Busloads of children were brought in to pay their respects to Chiang Kai-shek (蔣中正), known as Generalissimo, who had died at 87, after decades ruling Taiwan under brutal martial law. “There were a lot of buses, and there was a long queue,” Hsieh recalled. “It was a school rule. We had to bow, and then we went home.” Chiang’s body is still there, under guard in a mausoleum at the end of a path
Last week the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) released a set of very strange numbers on Taiwan’s wealth distribution. Duly quoted in the Taipei Times, the report said that “The Gini coefficient for Taiwanese households… was 0.606 at the end of 2021, lower than Australia’s 0.611, the UK’s 0.620, Japan’s 0.678, France’s 0.676 and Germany’s 0.727, the agency said in a report.” The Gini coefficient is a measure of relative inequality, usually of wealth or income, though it can be used to evaluate other forms of inequality. However, for most nations it is a number from .25 to .50