Eve Ensler on New Memoir & Confronting Gender Violence with Congolese Activist Christine Deschryver (June 2013)
Eve Ensler is the award-winning playwright and creator of “The Vagina Monologues” and V-Day, a global movement to stop violence against women and girls. V-Day, in turn, gave rise to One Billion Rising, a Feb. 14, 2013, event urging women and men to “strike, dance, rise” against violence. Ensler is out with a new memoir, “In the Body of the World,” an exploration of the female body — how to talk about it, how to protect it and how to value it. She shares her deeply intimate, painful relationship with her own body and how it has changed throughout her life — from being raped by her father to struggling with anorexia, from battling uterine cancer to reclaiming her body when dancing with the women of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Ensler joins us to discuss her book and her campaign against gender violence, along with Christine Schuler Deschryver, a Congolese human rights activist with V-Day. Schuler Deschryver is the director of City of Joy, a revolutionary community for women survivors of gender violence in Bukavu.