'Vagina' is dropped from Vagina Memoirs event to be more inclusive
Every year, the Associated Students Women’s Center hosts the Vagina Memoirs, an event where the air is filled with stories from women, audience members snapping in support and calling out, “F*ck that!” This year they’re dropping the ‘vagina’ from Vagina Memoirs and changing the event around to focus more on marginalized gender identities. Memoirs coordinator Sierra Flanagan said that historically the memoirs have been catered toward white cis women and has served as an eight week process for them to write about their
Information courtesy of AS Women's Center.
marginalized gender identity. “To me, it was a very harmful process,” Flanagan said. When she first got the position as Memoirs coordinator, she went through all the evaluations from the previous year and found that the cast members felt like they had reopened a wound without a way to process afterward. Flanagan decided it was time for a change. “I decided to scratch the performance to make it more safe and inclusive, scratched the name so it’s no longer Vagina Memoirs.” “It’s not going to be limited to women any longer because not everyone that has a vagina considers themselves a woman, and not every woman has a vagina. There’s people who aren’t in the binary that we often leave out in these conversations, so this is going to be way more geared toward marginalized gender identities,” she said.The show is referred to as Memoirs and will be a visual art show in the B Gallery rather than a spoken performance in the Viking Union Multipurpose Room. Junior Madison Syverson first heard about Memoirs at the Red Square Information Fair in September.“I was just interested in finding out more about it, it’s just something that I felt I wanted to get involved in. It’s exciting,” she said. “My vision is that this year’s Memoirs is for the cast and not for the audience,” Flanagan said. The Memoirs will start their process and select cast members by Nov. 16 and the show will be in the B Gallery from March 2-5, 2016.
