The vagina has metaphorically and metonymically been the body part that stands in for the category “woman” and it is this emphatic and fabricated link that imposes itself on bodies, psyches, and lives with often horrifying consequences. My goals in exploring performative and performing vaginas are many. I not only lay out how, why, and in what ways the “normal” and “abled” female body established in both dominant and mainstream discourses is, simply put, one with a specific type of vagina, but I also confront the “truth” that vaginas purport to tell about women and femininity. Ultimately, I maintain that representations of vaginas and the debates and discourses that surround them tell us something about our culture’s fears, anxieties, and hopes.
Living life as abject can be painful, even unbearable, yet as individuals negotiate this life they can experience pleasure, assert agency, and express ethical and just visions of the world. The artists, writers, and performers explored in this dissertation strategically perform vaginas in multiple and disparate ways. As they trouble, resist, and negotiate “normative” understandings of vaginas, they simultaneously declare that the problem is not about bodies at all. The problem is not the vagina. Instead, the problem concerns our cultural attitudes that regard non-normative bodies and identities as abnormal, perverse, disabled, pathological, and incomplete.
As performing vaginas disarticulate, disrupt, and reconceptualize the assumed connections between anatomy and identity, a world that could be, a future not so far away, begins to open up. As a result, we might imagine an alternative future where queer, raced, and/or disabled bodies are not named, categorized, fixed, shunned, shamed, and/or punished. One cannot merely counter “negative” representations of the vagina, nor can the vagina solely be embraced as a woman’s center or her connection to all women. Instead of determining and limiting just how one should live out her life as a woman, is it possible for vaginas to determine nothing specific at all thereby opening up both the category woman and vaginas to infinite possibilities?