Reorganizing Menstruation

Reorganizing menstruation explores what happens when menstrual practices change, and what is revealed and made possible when longstanding menstrual stigma is disrupted. Menstruation matters: how it is perceived and practiced gives us important information about society and how people and bodies are treated. Menstrual norms tell us whether cultures value or dismiss the female reproductive body, women's pain and suffering, sustainability concerns, and the cyclical rhythms that underpin life on Earth. Despite menstruation being a culturally complicated and ubiquitous experience of female embodiment, few feminist theorists have tackled the topic directly. This book develops feminist theory and methodology to offer an innovative socioeconomic perspective on the everyday experiences of managing menstrual blood and menstruating at work, based on empirical research conducted in Australia and the UK on the menstrual cup and the menstrual workplace policy. The core argument of the book is that while contemporary menstrual innovations are often aligned with neoliberal capitalist values of individualism and efficiency, they also demonstrate a challenge to these same values in radical ways, away from profit-driven enclosure of the female body and towards a 'menstrual commons'. Menstrual innovations therefore offer information about how we might reshape-or be already in the process of reshaping-current norms of commodification, capitalization, and embodiment more broadly.

Reorganizing menstruation explores what happens when menstrual practices change, and what is revealed and made possible when longstanding menstrual stigma is disrupted. Menstruation matters: how it is perceived and practiced gives us important information about society and how people and bodies are treated. Menstrual norms tell us whether cultures value or dismiss the female reproductive body, women's pain and suffering, sustainability concerns, and the cyclical rhythms that underpin life on Earth. Despite menstruation being a culturally complicated and ubiquitous experience of female embodiment, few feminist theorists have tackled the topic directly. This book develops feminist theory and methodology to offer an innovative socioeconomic perspective on the everyday experiences of managing menstrual blood and menstruating at work, based on empirical research conducted in Australia and the UK on the menstrual cup and the menstrual workplace policy. The core argument of the book is that while contemporary menstrual innovations are often aligned with neoliberal capitalist values of individualism and efficiency, they also demonstrate a challenge to these same values in radical ways, away from profit-driven enclosure of the female body and towards a 'menstrual commons'. Menstrual innovations therefore offer information about how we might reshape-or be already in the process of reshaping-current norms of commodification, capitalization, and embodiment more broadly.