Everyday Discourses Of Menstruation

Download or read book Everyday Discourses of Menstruation written by Victoria Louise Newton and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-05-24 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Menstruation is a topic which is both everyday and sensitive. From Leviticus to Pliny, to twentieth-century debates around 'menotoxin', to advertising and 'having the painters in', Victoria Newton's book offers a lively and innovative exploration of the social and cultural dimensions of menstruation. Through in-depth interviews with men and women, the book explores the many different ways in which this sensitive topic is spoken about in British culture. Looking specifically at euphemism, jokes, popular knowledge, everyday experience and folklore, the book provides original insights into the different discourses acting on the menstruating body and encourages debate about how these help to shape our everyday attitudes towards menstruation.

Download or read book The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies written by Chris Bobel and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-07-24 with total page 1041 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access handbook, the first of its kind, provides a comprehensive and carefully curated multidisciplinary and genre-spanning view of the state of the field of Critical Menstruation Studies, opening up new directions in research and advocacy. It is animated by the central question: ‘“what new lines of inquiry are possible when we center our attention on menstrual health and politics across the life course?” The chapters—diverse in content, form and perspective—establish Critical Menstruation Studies as a potent lens that reveals, complicates and unpacks inequalities across biological, social, cultural and historical dimensions. This handbook is an unmatched resource for researchers, policy makers, practitioners, and activists new to and already familiar with the field as it rapidly develops and expands.

Download or read book The Managed Body written by Chris Bobel and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-10-19 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Managed Body productively complicates ‘menstrual hygiene management’ (MHM)—a growing social movement to support menstruating girls in the Global South. Bobel offers an invested critique of the complicated discourses of MHM including its conceptual and practical links with the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) development sector, human rights and ‘the girling of development.’ Drawing on analysis of in-depth interviews, participant observations and the digital materials of NGOs and social businesses, Bobel shows how MHM frames problems and solutions to capture attention and direct resources to this highly-tabooed topic. She asserts that MHM organizations often inadvertently rely upon weak evidence and spectacularized representations to make the claim of a ‘hygienic crisis’ that authorizes rescue. And, she argues, the largely product-based solutions that follow fail to challenge the social construction of the menstrual body as dirty and in need of concealment. While cast as fundamental to preserving girls’ dignity, MHM prioritizes ‘technological fixes’ that teach girls to discipline their developing bodies vis a vis consumer culture, a move that actually accommodates more than it resists the core problem of menstrual stigma.

Download or read book Men and Menstruation written by David Linton and published by Visual Communication. This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though a biological characteristic, menstruation is also a complex social construction, one that men play an active role in creating via a process of "menstrual transactions." This book explores the means by which menstruation is given meaning through an examination of a wide variety of such transactions.

Download or read book Girls in Power written by Laura Fingerson and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Girls in Power offers a fascinating and unique look at the social aspects of menstruation in the lives of adolescent girls—and also in the lives of adolescent boys. Although there has been much research on other aspects of gender and the body, this is one of the few books to examine menstruation and the first to explore how it plays a part in power interactions between boys and girls. Talking openly in single- and mixed-gender settings, individuals and groups of high school–age girls and boys share their interpretations and experiences of menstruation. Author Laura Fingerson reveals that while teens have negative feelings about menstruation, teen girls use their experiences of menstruation as a source of embodied power in their interactions with other girls and with boys. She also explores how boys deal with their own reduced power. The book extends our theoretical and analytical understanding of youth, gender, power, and embodiment by providing a more balanced view of adolescent social life.

Download or read book New Blood written by Chris Bobel and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Chris Bobel is a careful ethnographer, respectful of research participants, and while she clearly takes a stand on menstrual activism, she handily defends her proposition that feminism is `finding its balance between reliving its past and creating its future.' Bobel's work, which includes incisive analysis of how third-wave, activists incorporate and update tactics and strategies of the second wave, will be a welcome addition to the scholarship of feminism." Elizabeth Kissling, author of Capitalizing on the Curse: The Business of Menstruation --

Download or read book The Modern Period written by Lara Freidenfelds and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2009-06-15 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2010 Emily Toth Award for Best Book in Women’s Studies, Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association The Modern Period examines how and why Americans adopted radically new methods of managing and thinking about menstruation during the twentieth century. In the early twentieth century women typically used homemade cloth "diapers" to absorb menstrual blood, avoided chills during their periods to protect their health, and counted themselves lucky if they knew something about menstruation before menarche. New expectations at school, at play, and in the workplace, however, made these menstrual traditions problematic, and middle-class women quickly sought new information and products that would make their monthly periods less disruptive to everyday life. Lara Freidenfelds traces this cultural shift, showing how Americans reframed their thinking about menstruation. She explains how women and men collaborated with sex educators, menstrual product manufacturers, advertisers, physical education teachers, and doctors to create a modern understanding of menstruation. Excerpts from seventy-five interviews—accounts by turns funny and moving—help readers to identify with the experiences of the ordinary people who engineered these changes. The Modern Period ties historical changes in menstrual practices to a much broader argument about American popular modernity in the twentieth century. Freidenfelds explores what it meant to be modern and middle class and how those ideals were reflected in the menstrual practices and beliefs of the time. This accessible study sheds new light on the history of popular modernity, the rise of the middle class, and the relationship of these phenomena to how Americans have cared for and managed their bodies.