On the Texture/Texxture of Woven Vaginas: Textile Theatrical Objects and (Dis)embodied Female Labour

This article examines Dao Yin ( Saying Vagina ), a feminist play produced by the Beijing-based theatre collective Vagina Project, focusing on textile theatrical objects representing the vagina, such as cloth, plush puppets and woven fabric scenery. Sharing methodological foundations with Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues , Dao Yin engages in feminist myth making through textile art. By analysing both onstage and offstage female textile work, this study highlights a dual dynamic: the visible artistic labour animating textile props onstage and the inert woven vaginal scenery that obscures the labour of its fabrication. Situating this work within a global commodity meshwork, the article foregrounds the weaving labour of female migrant workers and its translation to symbolic representation. Drawing on Eve Sedgwick’s concepts of texture and ‘ texxture ’, the analysis surfaces effaced histories of textile labour, the corporeal vulnerability it entails, and the material traces entangled in a theatre of feminist vaginal symbolism.