Some old but still important notes on menstruation

“Menstrual poverty” has gained worldwide attention in recent years. Google search “period poverty” and countless articles and organizations appear that have explored the issue of how the menstrual cycle affects quality of life. Google Trends shows peak interest in October 2019, which is the first National Period Day in the United States. Also in Europe, partly due to Plan International and De Bovengrondse, studies of experiences of menstruation and its influences have been produced. Some findings: approximately 9% of the 1000 participants of the survey by Plan International in the Netherlands indicated that they cannot always pay for their period (De Bovengrondse 2019: 26). These were mainly homeless people and citizens on social assistance benefits (ibid.: 5). The studies provide insights into the extent to which participants struggle with social stigmas and taboos that make it difficult to communicate symptoms and needs around the menstrual cycle (ibid.). How the menstrual cycle is embodied in all its diversity, not only provides perspective on the status of the body as it relates to social identities but also on how malleability is practised. 

Because studies of the menstrual cycle are overwhelmingly biomedical, the multiplicity of menstruating remains a rich field for further investigation. For instance, anthropological research into the ritualization of menstruation and how it intersects with social identities sheds light on the intimate interweaving of social and physiological reality. With the famous assertion that “dirt is matter out of place”, Mary Douglas (1966) tried to show how menstrual blood isn’t simply a “dirty matter” that provokes disgust but it gets this meaning because of the social organization among communities. She explained as follows:

“The mistake is to treat bodily margins in isolation from all other margins. [...] This is the clue which explains the unevenness with which different aspects of the body are treated in the rituals of the world. In some, menstrual pollution is feared as lethal danger; in others not at all” (Douglas 1966: 150). 

If we look to the “worldwide Goddess movement”, for instance, the menstrual cycle signals a connection to Mother Earth, which is imagined as a female being. Those who feel themselves part of this movement, ritualize the menstrual cycle by bleeding directly onto earth thus imagining its fertilization. This is said to be an emancipatory practice, because it gives the menstrual cycle a useful and sacred purpose. We thus see a sacralization similar to the consecration of bread and wine, and a subversion of the sins of Eve. By imagining Mother Earth as a female being, the group creates an ontology where the menstrual cycle signals a goddess-like connection to fertile existence. Given this marking of menstrual blood as a useful and sacred purpose of fertilization, the cycle is a phenomenon that is ritualized without synthetic or biomedical intervention. The materiality of the menstrual cycle is thus on the one hand a robust, self-sustaining system of the body; on other hand, strongly receptive to social and cultural making. In contrast, the menstrual cycle is represented by the menstrual products industry as a matter of hygiene. The narrative of menstruation as an unsanitary process and the blood as a source of shame is still actively propagated in advertisements for menstrual products (Plan International UK 2019: 10). In Plan International's discussions with young women in the United Kingdom, the associations with menstruation, i.e. the premenstrual and menstrual phases, proved to be overwhelmingly negative and were described in terms of "inconvenient" or "uncomfortable". In this context, the use of tampons and pads is encouraged, and the contraceptive pill is a primary care physician for painful or uncomfortable periods. Here it can be said that the menstrual cycle exists not only as something dirty but, as described by De Beauvoir, as an alienating object. She wrote:

“It is during her periods that she feels her body most painfully as an obscure, alien thing. Woman, like man, is her body; but her body is something other than herself” (De Beauvoir 1952: 29). 

As De Beauvoir pointed out in Le Deuxième Sexe (1949), such an approach implies a subjective, mental relationship to the menstrual cycle as a biological or medical object. That the menstrual cycle could also be integrated into our lives as something meaningful is dominated by anxiety of it being polluting. Biomedical perspectives on menstruation, in their mechanical character, integrate it in our living environment as an alien and often unwanted thing. Not only is this an effect we may want to emancipate from, but data produced by analyzing the use of menstrual apps even shows how variations in the menstrual cycle are many times greater than many clinical guidelines set out (Bull 2019). Studies have examined measurable correlations between menstrual cycle variation and social categories, such as ethnicity and lifestyle. All this to say that the menstrual cycle isn’t simply a physiological experience, its variations are concrete embodiments of social realities. 

Anthropologist Emilia Sanabria (2016) engages with the idea of the plasticity of the human body and describes the menstrual cycle as a nature-culture hybrid. The materiality of reproductive biology, she argues, is amenable to social and medical developments. Plasticity makes menstruation a product of both cultural discourses and the 'natural' legacy of our reproductive biology. Through a lens of intersectionality, we can then provide an analysis of how social categories such as class, ethnicity, and gender shape the embodiment of menstruation. The menstrual hygiene industry, as well as the pharmaceutical industry, actively shape the desires of potential consumers and with this the status quo. For example, the ability to synthetically suppress the menstrual cycle is constructed as a sign of modernity among participants of Sanabria’s study in Bahia, Brazil. This 'modern person' who rarely menstruates, however, remains out of reach for those in the working classes. Not only is the affordability of birth control influential on the experience of menstruation, but also which type of contraception is seen as modern, clean, or emancipatory. How the physicality of menstruation is constructed—for example, as evolutionarily inferior, or rather as a privileged mode of being closely associated with nature (think of the Goddess Movement)—all of which are intertwined with religious beliefs, as well as racial and sexual views. Sanabria explains this in the context of Bahia, Brazil:

“In Latin America, normality is associated with nature and modernity implies a move out of nature, which naturalizes intervention.” (Sanabria 2016: 151) 

The plastic character of bodies, according to her, is particularly dominant there because of this view on the body as “naturally malleable”. This alleged character makes medical intervention a natural phenomenon that offers the population opportunities to modernize, to a state where 'biology is no longer destiny'. Emancipation through suppressing the menstrual cycle. Yet an emancipation for the few, not the many. Who and what exercises power over sexual identities and gender systems can thus be observed in these variations of embodiment (in this case of the menstrual cycle). The politics of malleability shapes how the body is thought, thus how politics is embodied. It is paramount to note the marginalization of queerness (and queer bodies) that is implied in a heteronormative system. When we construct the menstrual cycle as female, for instance, it erases the entire experience and material reality of intersex and transgender people. Caring for menstrual poverty, and all these menstrual experiences is thus a practice of refusing narratives of purity and engaging with the creative ways in which we may exist.