I recently visited The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and observed the enormous tampon chandelier created by Portuguese artist, Joana Vasconcelos. The opulent light fixture seemed to put a spotlight on the tampon as a patriarchally ascribed âsanitary deviceâ of the twentieth century, now almost a historical documentation of so-called menstrual hygiene. Each bullet-like hermetically sealed tampon looked to me like a little phallic thing for plugging up womenâs clinically termed âvaginal cavities.â The medicinal white, highly absorbent micro penis-like devices for stopping the detritus that would better run freely, perhaps onto an ecological pad, possibly into a silicon cup to be later emptied and reused, were elaborately strung together. The whole sculptural apparatus seemed to me both a glorification and a critical meditation on men trying to get up there. The artwork starkly demonstrated that despite the menstrual activism of the past two decades we are still encouraged to stopper up our cervixes on a periodic basis, lest the unseemly red matter of menstruation be allowed to appear in daylight (even despite the high-profile free bleeding movement). The tampon chandelier-relic featured as a kind of living representation of the menstrual tabooâs longevityâits penetrative power into the twenty-first century. And yet, if feminist pop-punk band Pussy Riot can openly celebrate the vagina in their song Straight Outta Vagina (2016) as a space of politically charged rebirth, particularly with respect to the revitalisation of womenâs embodied voice in contemporary popular culture, then how is it possible that menstruation is still taboo? And, more importantly what emancipatory imaginary already exists in literary and philosophical texts that depict menstruation as the good flow of the cunt?
In this book, I playfully elaborate a wild zone of feminist creative resistance with respect to womenâs animalistic procreative embodiment, which is more important than ever. Whilst French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and FĂ©lix Guattari identify a point of rupture from phallocentric networks of power with their becoming woman of history, which is important, they delineate this trans-mobilisation of desire for a man. In these terms their becoming woman of history fashions a radiant transgressive sexuality, which is in fact not applicable to a woman per se.1 My book calls for women to urgently de-colonise their biopsychical beings from phallic networks in accordance with their sexual difference, specifically menstruation. As French theorist Luce Irigaray apprehends, women can initiate artistic process relative to a vital flow of desire based in sexual difference, against the âruling symbolic,â or what has been referred to as a patriarchal authority, which brings about an important source of their emancipation. Certainly, an intersectional approach to reading what I term the menstrual imaginary is extremely important. Clearly trans men, trans women and non-binary people similarly initiate artistic process in relation to vital flows of desire based in sexual difference, which are extremely important. In this book I specifically focus on the menstruating woman who has historically been separated as a class pertaining to her reproductive difference, which has marked her dangerous, polluted and potentially hysterical, on the one hand, and magical, even sacred, on the other handâexposing a dangerous binary at work in patriarchal cultures that must be overturned. Indeed, it is womenâs flow that has historically been most impeded, constrained and colonised globally owing to its anomalous character, which can be affirmatively re-articulated in relation to womenâs heterogenous embodiment.
Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Judith Wright, Anne Sexton, Rita Dove, Sharon Olds, Angela Carterâthese significant women, among many others, have written poetry and prose about their relationship to the menstrual cycle. Yet, this important theme in womenâs writing has been largely neglected. The relationship of the menstrual cycle to womenâs subjectivity and creativity is rarely acknowledged, let alone celebrated. While several theorists have sought to identify menstrual imagery and motifs in literary texts, none have identified these texts as contributing to the formation of a menstrual imaginary. A menstrual imaginary offers a source of inspiration to women writers, poets and artists; it is an imaginary domain outside of language, which is drawn on and demonstrated poetically in writing , as well as in film and artistic practice, through references to blood flow, eruptions, as well as all animalistic procreative stuffs. In this book I specifically read literary and philosophical texts for evidence of a menstrual imaginary, including texts that have not previously been identified as menstrual texts, as well as present a series of new menstrual tales, which tends to situate my book as somewhat divergent to the emerging field of what Sharra Vostral terms âcritical menstrual studiesâ in her book Toxic Shock: A Social History (2018). And yet, The Menstrual Imaginary in Literature: Notes on a Wild Fluidity offerâs valuable new perspectives on menstruation that will likely expand the âcritical menstrual studiesâ field of enquiry.
As Chris Bobel, leading-light of the âcritical menstrual studiesâ movement, argues in New Blood: Third Wave Feminism and the Politics of Menstruation (2010), the menstrual taboo still exerts power in society. It exerts power despite menstrual activism and the existence of the free bleeding movement. Free bleeding is a movement to not block, or collect, the menstrual flow. Most notably, in 2015, Kiran Gandhi ran the London marathon free of any so-called sanitary devices, such as tampons, pads or menstrual cups. Photographs of her blood-stained leggings went viral. In The Independent newspaper in the UK, Gandhi stated that âIt would have been way too uncomfortable to worry about a tampon for 26.2 miles ⊠I ran with blood dripping down my legs for sisters who donât have access to tampons and sisters who, despite cramping and pain, hide it away and pretend like it doesnât exist. I ran to say, it does exist, and we overcome it every dayâ (Gandhi quoted in Sanghani 2015, n.p.). Gandhi alerts us to the fact that choosing whether to use a tampon, a pad or a menstrual cup is a first world problem. Many people still donât have access to menstrual paraphernalia, let alone enjoy the privilege of being able to choose which ones they prefer to use. And yet, whilst Gandhiâs highly public menstruation was applauded around the world and successfully unmasked menstruation as a bodily process that women, trans men and non-binary people certainly ought not to be ashamed of, her comments infer that menstruation is something we regularly âovercomeâ (Gandhi 2015, n.p.). Does Gandhiâs free bleeding run also demonstrate that many women, trans men and non-binary people menstruate despite the fact that itâs commonly felt to be mostly an annoying and painful part of their lives frequently associated with suffering, which they overcome on a regular basis?
The popular media certainly seems to side with the notion of menstruation as something that must be overcomeâa painful episodic event in the lives of predominantly women. In series two of the award-winning comedy television show Fleabag (Two Brothers Pictures, 2016â2019), Phoebe Waller-Bridge in her role as Fleabag shares a martini with a business woman named Belinda, played by Kristin Scott Thomas, who delivers a lengthy monologue specifically on womenâs biological function as culturally definitive, bringing with it a world of suffering, particularly with an emphasis on cyclical pain. She says:
âWomen are born with pain built in. Itâs our physical destiny: period pain, sore boobs, child birth, you know. We carry it within ourselves throughout our lives. Men donât. They have to seek it out. They invent all these gods and demons and things just so they donât feel guilty about things, which is something we do very well on our own. And then they create wars so they can feel things and touch each other. And when there arenât any warâs they can play rugby. And we have it all going on in he...