Critical Menstruation Studies, Week 3: #periodtwitter and a SURVEY!

April 09, 2017 in menstruation studies!

This is the third in a five-week series of posts recapping a micro-seminar I'm taking on Critical Menstruation Studies through the Boston-area Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies.

The theme of this week's class was "Representing the Menstrual Cycle." The readings covered a pretty wide range of topics:

"Construction of Negative Images of Menstruation in Indian TV Commercials," an article from the journal Health Care for Women International (2012);
"Menopausal and misbehaving: When Women 'Flash' in Front of Others," a chapter from Embodied Resistance: Challenging the Norms, Breaking the Rules (2011), a collection co-edited by the seminar instructor, Chris Bobel;
and a piece by Leslie-Jean Thornton on representation of menstruation on Twitter, "'Time of the Month' on Twitter: Taboo, Stereotype and Bonding in a No-Holds-Barred Public Arena," published in the Sex Roles journal in 2011.

Critical Menstruation Studies, Week 2: Menstruators and Period Power (?)

April 02, 2017 in menstruation studies!

This is the second in a five-week series of posts recapping a micro-seminar I'm taking on Critical Menstruation Studies through the Boston-area Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies.

For week two of the seminar, the stated topic was "Experiencing the Menstrual Cycle." This took the form of readings on the embodied experience of particular groups of menstruators: religious women, masculine of center people and transgender women, and women in relationships (in the context of PMS). Here are the readings:

A fact sheet published by The Society for Menstrual Cycle Research, "The Menstrual Cycle: A Feminist Lifespan Perspective";
Two articles from Sex Roles: A Journal of Research: "Restriction and Renewal, Pollution and Power, Constraint and Community: The Paradoxes of Religious Women's Experiences of Menstruation" by Nicki C. Dunnavant and Tomi-Ann Roberts (2013) and "PMS as a Gendered Illness Linked to the Construction and Relational Experience of Hetero-Femininity" by Jane M. Ussher and Janette Perz (2013);
and an article from Culture, Health, and Sexuality, Joan Chrisler et al.'s "Queer Periods: Attitudes Toward Experiences with Menstruation in the Masculine of Centre and Transgender Community" (2016).
We also watched short videos on the impact of menstruation in the homeless population (although the video didn't address the intersection of trans issues and homeless issues in this arena, which seems like a strange omission given the high rates of homelessness among trans youth, especially) and women soldiers (fair warning, this is a very weird and problematic video).

Critical Menstruation Studies, Week 1: Binaries, Vocabulary, and Controversial Norwegian Sex Ed Videos

March 26, 2017 in menstruation studies!

This is the first in a 5-week series of posts recapping a micro-seminar I'm taking on Critical Menstruation Studies through the Boston-area Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies.

The first session of the seminar was dedicated to the topic of "Conceptual Frameworks: Stigma, Disciplined Bodies and Commodification." Here's a list of the readings:

A chapter entitled "Feminist Engagements with Menstruation" from the instructor, Chris Bobel's, book New Blood: Third-Wave Feminism and the Politics of Menstruation (2010);
"Technology and Passing," a chapter from Sharra Louise Vostral's book Under Wraps: A History of Hygiene Technology (2011);
"The Menstrual Mark: Menstruation as Social Stigma," an article by Ingrid Johnston-Robledo and Joan Chrisler from the scientific journal Sex Roles (2013);
and Gloria Steinem's fairly famous 1978 piece from Ms., "If Men Could Menstruate."

denying / her wounds came from the same source as her power

March 22, 2017 in self reflective, menstruation studies!

Despite telling myself that I'd find a way stay involved in the world of critical thinking and writing, I've pretty much avoided anything academic since leaving grad school almost four years ago. There was (lolz: IS) so much complex emotional and psychological angst tied up in that world for me and I couldn't figure out how to get around it. Even the smallest foray back towards grad student-adjacent activities triggered intense impostor syndrome, regret, and anxiety. So, I avoided it. Like you do.

This week, however, I'm making a small step (okay, probably an inadvisably dramatic and dangerous leap) back towards that lost world. When I was in graduate school, I took several classes through the Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies, which is a really fantastic Boston-area resource (if you're a Boston-area grad student with even the slightest interest in gender and sexuality studies, you really need to know about it). The GCWS sponsors a few classes every semester, and the classes are always team-taught, interdisciplinary, and informed by a variety of feminist pedagogical approaches. The classes that I took covered American Women's Biography, Body Narratives in Popular Film, and Motherhood/Mothering. This year, the GCWS started running a new kind of "micro-seminar," a set of short, ungraded, graduate-level discussion-based classes. On a whim, I wrote to ask if I was eligible to participate as a GCWS alumna, and that's how I ended up signed up for five weeks of Critical Menstruation Studies.