Blood Stories

Menarche and the Politics of the Female Body in Contemporary U.S. Society

Janet Lee, Jennifer Sasser-Coen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317958826
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Blood Stories focuses on menarche as a central aspect of body politics in contemporary US society, emphasizing that women are integrated into the social and sexual order through the body. Using oral and written narratives of 104 diverse women, the authors address the central question of how menarche as a bodily event signifying womanhood takes on cultural significance in a society that devalues women. Exploring issues of contamination and concealment and the sexualization of women's bodies that occurs at menarche, the authors emphasize how the politics of gender are negotiated on/through women's bodies.

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Bodies and Blood

Throughout patriarchal mythology, dream-symbolism, theology and language, two ideas flow side by side: one, that the female body is impure, corrupt, the site of discharges, bleedings, dangerous to masculinity, a source of moral and physical contamination.… On the other hand, as mother the woman is beneficent, sacred, pure, asexual, nourishing; and the physical potential for motherhood—that same body with its bleedings and mysteries—is her single destiny and justification in life.

—Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born

Woman and the Body

The human body is a cultural artifact. While our bodies are biophysical entities, what our bodies mean and how they are experienced has much to do with the sociocultural and historical spaces they occupy. Both men and women have bodies, but what male and female bodies signify tend to be two quite different things in most cultures. Specificity here is important: discourses about the body exhibit cultural and historical variations such that there can never be one official “bodily history,” despite what scientific discourses assert. While corporeality brings with it certain universal experiences—such as birth, development, aging, pain, desire, and death—one typical human body does not exist; there are as many bodily histories as there are human beings. The corollary is that a phenomenon such as menstruation—while a nearly universal physiological process among females—is characterized by specific historical, cultural, and personal meanings and practices. Menarche, accordingly, is a maturational event that originates from inside the female body and collides with meanings and practices originating from outside the female body.

In Western societies women have been associated with the body and the earth, while men, because of their association with the spirit and the sky, have been allowed to transcend the mundane toward abstract reason and the veneration of the mind. Such deep, myth-based connections have strongly informed gender ideologies, and have reinforced the determinism implied by the biological capabilities of the female body to bleed without injury or trauma and to bring forth and sustain life. Women’s monthly bleeding has been taken as evidence of and justification for their association with a debased, mundane body and their exclusion from the domain of reason. Scientific and medical models have exacerbated these gendered dichotomies, have framed the female body in denigrating and often dangerous ways, and have encouraged the idea that women’s lives are directed and circumscribed by their reproductive systems (Fausto-Sterling 1985; Highwater 1991; Martin 1987). At the same time, as Adrienne Rich’s statement at the start of this chapter suggests, there is a cultural place for the reverence of women’s bodies as sacred vessels for men’s children. To put these two meanings together is to invoke the familiar juxtaposition vis-a-vis cultural messages and sexual scripts: the reproductive mother or asexual “madonna” versus the sexual being or “whore.” And, in most cultures, it is at menarche that these two expressions of the feminine first come into conflict, as menarche simultaneously symbolizes the onset of reproductive and sexual potential. As Helen Deutsch (1944) suggested over half a century ago, menarche is when young women confront the double function of the female as sexual creature and as “servant of the species.”

The development of Western civilization has been predicated on the philosophical and practical opposition between “culture” and “nature” (Lloyd 1989; Wilshire 1989; Tarnas 1991). The separation between mind and body, flesh and spirit, is also rooted in this fundamental duality, which was formalized and codified during Hellenic times and has been reinforced and perpetuated for centuries since (Sheets-Johnstone 1992). According to this Western dualistic metaphysics, human beings as embodied creatures are part of nature and are stuck in space and time. This state implies that since experiences and thoughts are shaped and limited by the temporal and spacial location of the body, the mind’s projects—rationality, objectivity, and self-realization—are compromised. “Objectivity” and self-realization require dis-embodiment, that is, rejection and transcendence of the “mucky, humbling limitations of the flesh” (de Beauvoir 1952; Dinnerstein 1976). Despite historical variations in the images attached to the body, what lies at the core of all such images is the construal of the body as a thing of nature, separate from and subordinate to the mind as a thing of culture.

The domination of culture and mind over nature and body underlies the hierarchical dualism that is at the foundation of Western thought, giving us our cultural and bodily heritages (Berman 1989). Such thought is organized into polarities of either/or and is based on the belief that reality can be separated into categories of binary opposites in which one member of the pair is “normal” and the other “abnormal” (Highwater 1991). Further, this dualistic metaphysics is gendered. While a generic human body is located on the nature side of the culture/nature duality, the female body is the prototypical body from which this duality is engendered. Because of the unique biological capabilities of the female body, it is seen as being closer to nature and the organic realm than is the male body. As a result, the things women’s bodies do have been construed negatively and used as the justification for every variety of denigration and oppression. The natural, normal processes of the female body are symbolically marked as abnormal and taboo, distasteful, not to be trusted and potentially evil. Western civilization’s progress required “giving up the female gender—the material, passive, corporeal, and sense perceptible, for the male—active, rationale, and incorporeal” (Highwater 1991: 23).

Through the denigration and domination of nature and body, and the alignment of femaleness with “passive, indeterminate matter” (Lloyd 1989), women have become essentialized as bodies, seen at best as hopelessly part of the natural world of disorderly, decaying matter, and at worst as slaves to sinister bodily impulses and excretions meant to corrupt men and prevent their transcendence. Further evidence of the ways this complex system of interrelated dualities plays out can be witnessed in the continual endeavor of Western peoples to dominate the natural world and transcend the reality of embodiment. By disavowing the primacy and necessity of the body in the reality of being a living being, the Western human subject has attempted, and still attempts, to transcend the inevitable membership in nature. As a result, Western “civilizations” have tended to become alienated from nature and “her” processes of birth, growth, decay, and death. A case in point: one of the central goals of contemporary Western cultures is to harness technology in order to defy disease, mental and physical disability, aging, and ultimately death, so that true disembodiment can be achieved (see Berman 1989; Esposito 1987; Morgan 1982). Paradoxically, at the same time that we attempt to transcend the confines of the flesh, we make dieting, fitness, and cosmetic surgery—those things that alter how the body looks—religious pursuits. We suggest that behind both cultural preoccupations is the insidious belief that culture and nature, mind and body are indeed separable, that essentially the body is an object that can be manipulated.

Susan Bordo explores the meanings connected to the female body as cultural expressions of society’s ideals and anxieties in her book Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body. She discusses at length the cultural expressions of mind-body dualism and the association of women with the debased and passive body, emphasizing the systemic and embedded nature of these metaphysics, as well as the consequences these ideologies and behaviors have on women’s lives:

(The) mind/body dualism is no mere philosophical position, to be defended or dispensed with by clever argument. Rather, it is a practical metaphysics that has been deployed and socially embedded in medicine, law, literary and artistic representations, the psychological constructions of self, interpersonal relationships, popular culture, and advertisements—a metaphysics which will be deconstructed only through concrete transformation of the institutions and practices that sustain it. (1993: 11–12)

In other words, issues concerning the body are deeply embedded into social institutions and behaviors. They prescribe and proscribe so much of what we take as “normal” everyday life. Since women are associated with the body, earth and nature, and men with the abstract powers of reason, women’s bodies remind humans of their vulnerability and mortality. On the one hand, woman is associated with life, while on the other, her bleeding and oozing body—reminiscent of earthly vulnerabilities—is met with disgust. Male bodies are not so symbolically marked with such connotations. Men are more easily able to imagine their bodies free of such constraints, and they project their fears and hatred of frailty and mortality onto women’s flesh (Dinnerstein 1976).

Certainly, the practical metaphysics manifested in the objectification and separation of the body from the self is not endemic to the experiences of women alone, but is part of our sociocultural heritage, and thus is shared at some level by us all. However, we feel justified in asserting that women are differentially and more seriously affected by this cultural ideology because women are both defined as and yet separated from their bodies. While women and men alike experience the mind-body split, women, unlike men, are told in countless subtle and not-so-subtle ways that they are essentially only bodies—reproducers and (hetero)sex-objects. These ideas are elaborated upon in two important texts: Frigga Haug’s Female Sexualization and Jane Ussher’s The Psychology of the Female Body.

As already noted, the female body functions as a “text” of culture; it is one of the symbolic forms upon which the norms and practices of society are inscribed. Women’s bodies can be approached as cultural artifacts; culture is embodied and literally inscribed on the body, where it reproduces itself and maintains social categories. The female body is a site where different cultural discourses compete for attention. Women are affected by this cultural preoccupation with the body-as-object. The vulnerabilities of women’s status encourages us to be obsessed with body issues, and, as a result, suffer in the daily ordering of our lives. Women suffer because they are encouraged to internalize these discourses, and thus their bodily experiences become circumscribed and defined by dominant systems of thought and practice. This means that the separation of mind from body is not only an extremely durable philosophical construction, but for many women an experiential reality as well. The ways we live with our bodies, and the ways we think about processes such as menstruation, are fundamental expressions of our cultural values and ideologies.

Feminists have long been concerned about the body. Indeed, it was radical feminists who first explored the control of women’s bodies in both public and private spaces as essential for the maintenance of patriarchal societies. Writers and activists such as Gloria Steinem educated a generation with such witty pieces as “If Men Could Menstruate,” published in Ms. magazine in the 1970s. Alongside these efforts, scholars such as Susan Brownmiller, Rosalind Coward and Susie Orbach have worked to educate on the politics of appearance. They have focused on the enslavement of women by the media and by the products we are encouraged to buy and use, as well as the effects of the politics of appearance on women’s lives, most especially in terms of eating disorders. In Female Desires, Coward asks the relevant question: “How is it that the definitions addressed to clothes and women’s bodies become women’s own language? How is it we come to speak the words that are written on our body?” (1985: 30) Other texts on the politics of appearance—-such as Wendy Chapkis’ Beauty Secrets, The Obsession by Kim Chernin, Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, and the more recent Many Mirrors edited by Nicole Sault—continue to explore similar questions, stressing the social construction of beauty, its normalizing consequences on the reproduction of femininity and gender, the regulation of dominant relations in society vis-a-vis gender, race, class, age, ability and size, as well as the differing ways that the body is constructed through these systems of power.

Another perspective on the politics of appearance is offered by Patricia Hill Collins’ Black Feminist Thought (1990). Collins writes poignantly about the effects of white “beauty” standards on the lives of Black women, suggesting that externally imposed standards of beauty demoralize Black women and create feelings of inadequacy. This size and beauty debate, in both academic and more popular literary circles, has tended to center on the everyday realities of white women. Less has been written on the intersections of “looksism” with race and ethnicity, especially as it concerns racial groups other than Black women, although women in other racial groups have shared their understandings of these issues through poetry and fiction, as well as through more traditional texts (c.f. Wong 1995; Hernandez-Avila 1995). A collection on women, food, and body image edited by Catrina Brown and Karin Jasper, titled Consuming Passions, has an article on “Creating Beauty and Blackness.” In this piece, author Kim Shayo Buchanan explains the hesitancy expressed by some Black women about focusing on body issues in light of other more urgent material issues. She writes that women of color have rightly prioritized addressing the strict inequalities of racism and sexism such that “discomfort with appearance pales in comparison” (1993: 36). Other notable exceptions to the silence on issues of race and beauty are Nedhera Lander’s article in Shadow on a Tightrope, an anthology on fat oppression edited by Lisa Schoenfielder and Barb Wieser (1983). Here Lander discusses the particular effects of a fat oppressive culture on the lives of Black women. bell hooks’s Black Looks, and her chapter in Sisters of the Yam entitled “Dreaming Ourselves Dark and Deep,” explore these issues as well. In these writings, hooks analyzes Black internalization of and resistance to white supremacist images of anglo “beauty,” and seeks to remind Blacks of “their beauty and dignity in a world where their humanity was assaulted daily” (p. 83). She focuses on hair, feet, body size and color, and raises the important issue that for many Black women, class and ethnic notions encouraged “a utilitarian approach to the care of the self.” She writes: “Now, living as we do in a racist/sexist society that has, from slavery on, perpetuated the belief that the primary role of Black women should play in this society is that of servant, it logically follows that many of us internalize the assumption that our bodies do not need care, not from ourselves or from others” (1993: 88).

Other than scholarly work on the looks and beauty debate, theoretical and philosophical writings on the body tended to be underrepresented in the United States until relatively recently. New texts on “the body” are appearing with regular consistency: bell hooks’s Black Looks, already mentioned, Judith Butler’s Bodies That Matter, Patricia Foster’s collection Minding the Body, Elizabeth Grosz’s Volatile Bodies, and The Bodies of Women by Rosalyn Diprose are cases in point. However, as far as we are aware, no one has theoretically problematized menstrual bleeding in the context of this new scholarship on the body, and very few scholars writing on the body ever do more than mention menstruation briefly in passing.

Elizabeth Grosz, in her introduction to a special issue of Hypatia on “Feminism and the Body,” articulates the philosophical ambivalences concerning scholarship on the body. She writes of the body as:

a theoretical domain that has been relatively underdeveloped in feminist writings, and not without good reason: if feminists have tended to neglect and ignore the concept of the body this has to a large extent been as a reaction to the pervasively misogynistic treatment of women’s bodies, and to various patriarchal attempts to reduce women to their bodies when these bodies have been conceived in the most narrowly functionalist and reductionistic terms. (1991: 1)

Grosz alludes here, of course, to the tiresome “biology is destiny” argument. She raises the feminist dilemma of either addressing the body as essentially different and celebrating these (biological) differences as sources of strength and power, or attending to the conflation of sex with gender and emphasizing the need to move beyond such prescriptive and troublesome categories. Both issues are important for analyses of menstruation and our hope is to address and be explicit about these problematics and tendencies. However, we would ultimately like to move beyond these dualities by recognizing the potential strengths individual women who perceive their bleeding as connected to issues of power and efficacy experience in their lives, and, most importantly, by deconstructing gendered relations of domination implicit in scripts associated with menarche and menstruation.

Susan Bordo’s exploration of the metaphors of control and self-containment endemic to androcentric definitions of femininity provides a conceptual anchoring for our approach. In “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity: A Feminist Appropriation of Foucault,” she emphasizes that it is “through table manners and toilet habits, through seemingly trivial routines, rules and practices, culture is ‘made body,’ … converted into automatic, habitual activities” (1989: 13). Importantly, Bordo also suggests that “through these disciplines, we continue to memorize on our bodies the feel and conviction of lack, insufficiency, of never being good enough. At the farthest extremes, the practices of femininity may lead us to utter demoralization, debilitation, death” (14). She stresses that these practices and disciplines are about power and social control, and goes on to discuss the ways in which contemporary eating disorders can be read as cultural statements about gender, statements that are imbued with political meanings, and which reflect the rules of bodily discourse that script femininity. Bordo does not deal with menstrual practices, yet her insights are crucial for understanding how the rules and practices of menarche are internalized as part of the reproduction of femininity.

Discussing the body and the reproduction of femininity, Bordo cites Michel Foucault, emphasizing how the body is more than a medium of culture, how it also functions as a “practical, direct locus of social control” (13). In a similar fashion, Sandra Bartky, in her book Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression and her article “Foucault, Femininity and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power,” analyzes how these controls are maintained through panopticism, the internalization of discourses surrounding the body. She considers the disciplinary practices whereby the female body is transformed into a “feminine” one, emphasizing how sexuality is produced through power and hierarchical social relations are maintained. Like Bordo, while Bartky does not mention menstruation, her analysis of the disciplinary regimens of femininity is useful for us because of its explanation of the specific concrete practices that help produce feminine subjects, as well as the ways that the absence of a formal institutional structure and the decentralization of power require the internalization of sexual scripts. These tend to result in the illusion of great personal autonomy, and the idea that femininity is natural and voluntary—“The disciplinary power that inscribes femininity in the female body is everywhere and it is nowhere” (Bartky 1992: 112).

The work of Michel Foucault figures prominently in these scholars’ works. His texts The History of Sexuality and Discipline and Punish tend to be widely cited by all who do scholarship on the body. Foucault wrote about the regulatory mechanisms and everyday concrete practices that circumscribe the body and form it as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Menarche and Body Politics
• 1 Bodies and Blood
• 2 Women Re-membering Firstblood
• 3 Contamination and Concealment
• 4 (Hetero)Sexualization
• 5 Intricate Relationships
• 6 Older Women’s Bodily Histories
• Conclusion: Consciousness and Resistance
• References
• Index