Female sexuality has been troubling (male) imagination from the dawn of humanity. Each greater socio-political change had the mission to redefine the position of women in society: from the worship of fertility goddesses, exile from paradise, witch trials, clitoridectomies and other forms of treatment of female sexual lust, all the way to the objectification of the female body in capitalist present times. Still, we wonder if, in spite of millenniums of obsessive dealing with female sexual organ, we really know it at all? Viva la Vulva deals with serious and important issues playfully and through comedy. In the performance, we ceremoniously announce the list of suppressors of female sexuality, unravel several centuries of mysterious clitoris disappearance and repeat the word vagina, until it stops feeling as a taboo but as uttering of freedom.
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Graphic novel The Forbidden Fruit by Swedish cartoonist Liv Strömquist was published in Slovenian translation by Mila Gustinčič Pahor at Vige Vage knjige publishing house. It is a socially critical, political, feminist and humorous visual research of perception of sex organs and female sexuality through time. Author (with continuously citing) surveys the key historical, sociological and medical theories that still have influence over the position of women and girls both at individual as well as collective level. Creators of performance Viva la Vulva! found great inspiration in this graphic novel. Seemingly light and sarcastic way of cartoon narrative offered an interesting starting point to think about appropriate genre framing and theatre language that is able to produce both parody and activism. The denied matriarchal societies, gender as a social construct, pathologized and suppresed (female) lust, women (un)exuality, influence of social narrative about sexuality on female identity – are just some of the issues that the performance sheds some light on. Viva la Vulva! thus speaks about the denied, celebrates the despised and opens up public space for consideration about the most intimate.