Cunt Power!

“Cunt Power!” is a feminist slogan and a practice of reclaiming a word long treated as degrading. The book presents it first on buttons and T-shirts, as a sign of a recovered historical power, then as the title and language of a performance that makes speech itself an event: a word once used to diminish women is taken up, examined, and spoken aloud before an audience. Its cultural resonance rests on that reversal, and on the resistance that continues to surround the naming of women’s bodies.

Slogan and Reclaimed History

The phrase circulated on buttons and T-shirts as feminists sought to reclaim the word “cunt.” The narrator describes this not simply as reversing an insult but as recognizing a restoration of ancient power. She connects the word to the Indo-European root associated in the book with the goddess Kali’s title Kunda or Cunti, and notes its shared root with “kin” and “country.” In that account, the word’s history carries a claim to connection and belonging rather than shame.

The slogan’s force also responds to the wider exposure of violence against women’s bodies. The book sets the feminist anger of recent decades alongside the recovery of a word previously devalued. “Cunt Power!” therefore works at once as a public declaration and as a challenge to the silence surrounding female anatomy: it insists that naming can be reclaimed rather than surrendered to insult or embarrassment.

The Performance of Reclamation

In “Reclaiming Cunt,” the word is not treated as a single fixed label. The passage breaks it into sounds and associations, moving through lists of words beginning with or echoing its letters. The progression gives the language a physical, playful, and deliberately unruly movement; instead of explaining the slogan at a distance, the performance makes the audience attend to the act of saying it.

The piece culminates in a direct invitation to repeat the word. The narrator reports that “Reclaiming Cunt” worked the audience into such a frenzy that, when she demanded a response, they could not keep themselves from answering. This call-and-response turns the slogan from printed message into shared action. Its significance lies not only in what the word means but in who is willing to say it, and in the audience’s participation in undoing the silence around it.

Public Reception and Resistance

The book places this performance within the public visibility of The Vagina Monologues and V-Day, where attention and discomfort arrive together. Headlines recast the work as provocative spectacle, including a headline about Marlo Thomas and another about Donna Hanover’s decision to participate. On television, Kathie Lee Gifford chants “vagina” with Calista Flockhart and the studio audience; David Letterman struggles to say the word; Barbara Walters says she had been embarrassed by the work and thought it strident, before later recanting. CNN airs a ten-minute special without mentioning the word at its center.

That avoidance is not confined to media coverage. Although The Vagina Monologues opened and was published in more than twenty countries, including China and Turkey, V-Day had difficulty raising corporate money. Even companies that sold vaginal products would not associate themselves with the word. The book also contrasts women calling for tickets to the “Monologues” with men asking for the “Vagina Chronicles”; a punk ticket seller tells women that if they cannot say the word, they cannot come. The episode makes the slogan’s underlying conflict concrete: the word can attract publicity while remaining difficult for institutions and individuals to speak plainly.

Who Gets to Speak

The project’s language grows from conversations with women rather than from an abstract claim about a universal experience. The narrator says she spoke with more than two hundred women, including older and younger women, married and single women, lesbians, professors, actors, corporate professionals, sex workers, and women from a range of racial and religious backgrounds. At first, women were reluctant and shy; once they began talking, the narrator says, they were difficult to stop. The movement from hesitation to sustained speech echoes the performance’s movement from a withheld word to audience response.

The book also connects speaking and being heard to material circumstances. The narrator describes a decade of involvement with women without homes, including running recovery groups for women who had been raped. She notes that poor women’s sexual violence often goes unreported and that women facing abuse may lack access to therapy and other forms of healing; repeated abuse can lead to further harms, including substance use, prostitution, AIDS, and, in some cases, death. These accounts give the slogan a social context: reclaiming language matters, but the capacity to speak and obtain support is shaped by class and access to resources.

A college performance further shows how the work reached audiences differently. The narrator describes a student population that was 45 percent Black and Hispanic, with most students the first in their families to attend college and more than 65 percent coming from households earning less than $35,000 a year. She says these students had generally had little exposure to feminist literature and thought, and that the performance was a powerful experience for them. In this setting, “Cunt Power!” belongs not just to a public argument about a taboo word but to encounters through which women with distinct backgrounds meet feminist expression on their own terms.