When we take notice of menstrual health and its potential to inspire political resistance, we tap into a complex and long process of experiments on loosening the social control of women's bodies. Menstrual activism works to move embodiment from object to subject status—to see the body not as trivial, but as something rudimental, urgent, and politically important. When we take seriously the menstruating body, we link up with others who engage in critical embodiment work, from human trafficking to eating disorders to sexual assault. Menstruation unites the personal and the political, the intimate and the public, the minutiae, and the bigger stories about the body. It is about so much more than blood.
When we see menstrual health in context, we see what is really at stake in menstrual activist work. Because a challenge to the menstrual status quo is itself a critique of gender norms about embodiment, it productively leads us to ask some tough questions about what we take for granted. What can we learn about our cultural value systems when we consider enduring menstrual restrictions? What can we learn when we consider the popularity of skin-lightening creams or steroid abuse among teens? Who benefits from this values-in-practice? Who suffers? We have limited ourselves to such a narrow constraint mindset just so that we can fit ourselves in a box that society is willing to offer us. Certainly, menstruation is personal, but feminists have long understood that the personal is political, that is, while we may experience something—a monthly period, an act of intimate partner violence, an unplanned pregnancy—the way we respond to these events and the support, or lack of support, we can access is the consequence of something far bigger than ourselves.
While many may consider it almost rude to joke and laugh about menstrual blood but when you come to think of it, why shouldn't they? If we are willingly mocking about something like urinating or the stool that we excrete, regurgitating (vomiting) which are all-natural products of our body then we could perhaps mock about the menstrual blood too. In times of big political changes, many activists choose to reflect the context within their doctrines and consequently to create politically and socially engaged content which makes us wonder how much truth is really there in the depth of it all. A political strategy really, to promote menstrual health when it suits our cause. It is indeed a fact that I am embarrassed to admit. Our culture lost, our morals forgotten as menstrual health lies in shambles because we are just too afraid to accept the truth that we have turned something of such importance into nothing but a political agenda.
-Bidisha Dam
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