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 Menstruation Matters written by Bridget J. Crawford and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2024-10 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the burgeoning menstrual advocacy movement and analyzes how law should evolve to take menstruation into account. Approximately half the population menstruates for a large portion of their lives, but the law is mostly silent about the topic. Until recently, most people would have said that periods are private matters not to be discussed in public. But the last few years have seen a new willingness among advocates and allies of all ages to speak openly about periods. Slowly around the globe, people are recognizing the basic fundamental human right to address menstruation in a safe and affordable way, free of stigma, shame, or barriers to access. Menstruation Matters explores the role of law in this movement. It asks what the law currently says about menstruation (spoiler alert: not much) and provides a roadmap for legal reform that can move society closer to a world where no one is held back or disadvantaged by menstruation. Bridget J. Crawford and Emily Gold Waldman examine these issues in a wide range of contexts, from schools to workplaces to prisons to tax policies and more. Ultimately, they seek to transform both law and society so that menstruation is no longer an obstacle to full participation in all aspects of public and private life.
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 Flow written by Elissa Stein and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2009-11-05 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A normally taboo topic claims attention with the surprising—and sometimes horrifying—history of cultural reactions to menstruation.” —Publishers Weekly In this hip, hilarious and truly eye-opening cultural history, menstruation is talked about as never before. Flow spans its fascinating, occasionally wacky and sometimes downright scary story: from mikvahs (ritual cleansing baths) to menopause, hysteria to hysterectomies—not to mention the Pill, cramps, the history of underwear, and the movie about puberty they showed you in 5th grade. Flow answers such questions as: What’s the point of getting a period? What did women do before pads and tampons? What about new drugs that promise to end periods—a hot idea or not? Sex during your period: gross or a turn-on? And what’s normal, anyway? With color reproductions of (campy) historical ads and early (excruciating) femcare devices, it also provides a fascinating (and mind-boggling) gallery of this complex, personal and uniquely female process. As irreverent as it is informative, Flow gives an everyday occurrence its true props—and eradicates the stigma placed on it for centuries. “Its contents, I found, are plainspoken—perhaps it will start chipping away at the taboo . . . the style is important and groundbreaking.” —The New Yorker “In many ways, Flow is a breakthrough.” —Daily Beast “Flow isn’t just a book; it’s a movement.” —January Magazine “A witty look at the history of ‘the nuisance’ . . . for women of all ages. Who hasn’t wondered why we get a period, what women did before the invention of the tampon—let alone the pad. Flow explains all.” —Body and Soul Magazine
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 Regulating Menstruation written by Etienne van de Walle and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2001-06 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Menstruation, seen alternately as something negative—a "curse" or a failed conception—or as a positive part of the reproductive process to be celebrated as evidence of fertility, has long been a universal concern. How women interpret and react to menstruation and its absence reflects their individual needs both historically as well as in the contemporary cultural, social, economic, and political context in which they live. This unique volume considers what is known of women's options and practices used to regulate menstruation—practices used to control the periodicity, quantity, color, and even consistency of menses—in different places and times, while revealing the ambiguity that those practices present. Originating from an Internet conference held in February 1998, this volume contains fourteen papers that have been revised and updated to cover everything from the impact of the birth control pill to contemporary views on reproduction to the pharmacological properties of various herbal substances, reflecting the historical, contemporary, and anthropological perspectives of this timely and complex issue.
Download or read book Blood Relations written by Chris Knight and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The emergence of symbolic culture is generally linked with the development of the hunger-gatherer adaptation based on a sexual division of labor. This original and ingenious book presents a new theory of how this symbolic domain originated. Integrating perspectives of evolutionary biography and social anthropology within a Marxist framework, Chris Knight rejects the common assumption that human culture was a modified extension of primate behavior and argues instead that it was the product of an immense social, sexual, and political revolution initiated by women. Culture became established, says Knight, when evolving human females began to assert collective control over their own sexuality, refusing sex to all males except those who came to them with provisions. Women usually timed their ban on sexual relations with their periods of infertility while they were menstruating, and to the extent that their solidarity drew women together, these periods tended to occur in synchrony. The result was that every month with the onset of menstruation, sexual relations were ruptured in a collective, ritualistic way as the prelude to each successful hunting expedition. This ritual act was the means through which women motivated men not only to hunt but also to concentrate energies on bringing back the meat. Knight shows how this hypothesis sheds light on the roots of such cultural traditions as totemic rituals, incest and menstrual taboos, blood-sacrifice, and hunters’ atonement rites. Providing detailed ethnographic documentation, he also explains how Native American, Australian Aboriginal, and other magico-religious myths can be read as derivatives of the same symbolic logic.
Download or read book Menstruation written by Andrew Shail and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2005-12-10 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ranging from Aristotle to twentieth-century gynecology, contributions to this volume trace the semiotics of menstruation from magical act to evolutionary deficiency. The result is the first comprehensive historical study of how menstruation has been understood within various cultural traditions, with reference to political and social institutions, and medical and religious practices. Includes a guide for scholars on bibliographical and archival sources for the study of menstruation.
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 Menstruation and the Female Body in Early Modern England written by S. Read and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-10-31 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In early modern English medicine, the balance of fluids in the body was seen as key to health. Menstruation was widely believed to regulate blood levels in the body and so was extensively discussed in medical texts. Sara Read examines all forms of literature, from plays and poems, to life-writing, and compares these texts with the medical theories.
Download or read book The Curse written by Janice Delaney and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In its hard headed, richly documented concreteness, it is worth a thousand polemics." -- New York Times, from a review of the first edition "The Curse deserves a place in every women's studies library collection." -- Sharon Golub, editor of Lifting the curse of Menstruation "A stimulating and useful book, both for the scholarly and the general reader." -- Paula A. Treichler, co-author of A Feminist Dictionary
Download or read book Menstruation and Procreation in Early Modern France written by Dr Cathy McClive and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2015-04-28 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early modern bodies, particularly menstruating and pregnant bodies, were not stable signifiers. Menstruation and Procreation in Early Modern France presents the first full-length discussion of menstruation and its uncertain connections with embodied sex, gender and reproduction in early modern France. Attitudes to menstruation are explored in three inter-linked arenas: medicine, moral theology and law across the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Drawing on a wide range of diverse sources, including court records and private documents, the author uses case studies to explore the relationship between the exceptional corporeality of individuals and attempts to construct menstrual norms, reflecting on how early modern individuals, lay or otherwise, grappled with the enigma of menstruation. She analyzes how early modern men and women accounted for the function, recurrence and appearance of menstruation, from its role in maintaining health to the link between other physiological and bodily processes, including those found in both male and female bodies. She questions the assumption that menstruation was exclusively associated with women by the second half of the eighteenth century, arguing that whilst sex-related, menstruation was not sex-specific even at the turn of the nineteenth. Menstruation remains a contentious topic today. This book is not, therefore, simply a study of periods in early modern France, but is also of necessity an exploration about the nature and constitution of historical evidence, particularly bodily evidence and how historians use this evidence. It raises important questions about the concept of certainty and about the value of observation, testimony, expertise, the nature of language and the construction of bodily truths - about the body as witness and the body as evidence.
Download or read book Menstruation Across Cultures written by Nithin Sridhar and published by Global Collective Publishers. This book was released on 2021-08-26 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Menstruation across Cultures attempts to provide a detailed review of menstruation notions prevalent in India and in cultures from across the world. The world cultures covered in the book include Indic traditions like Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism; ancient civilisations like Greece, Rome, Mesopotamia and Egypt; and Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Two themes of special focus in the book are: Impurity and Sacrality. While they are often understood as being opposed to each other, the book examines how they are treated as two sides of the same coin, when it comes to menstruation. This is especially true in Indic traditions and pre-Christian polytheistic traditions like Greco-Roman, Mesopotamian and Egyptian. Impurity and Sacrality complement each other to form a comprehensive worldview in these cultures. The book also examines how the understanding of impurity in Abrahamic religions differs from those of polytheistic cultures. As part of the examination of the sacrality attached to menstruation, a special focus has also been given to the deities of menstruation in polytheistic cultures and to what Ayurveda and Yoga say about this essential function in a woman’s physiology. Finally, a comparative study of menstrual notions prevalent in modernity is presented, along with a Do and Don’t dossier.
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 Be Period Positive written by Chella Quint and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-08-24 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Period positivity starts with asking questions. This informative, irreverent, and absorbing book covers all your period-related questions - why they're taboo (and needn't be) and how to navigate the whole bleeding thing, from first periods to fertility, euphemisms to uteruses, menstrual products to menopause. Period Positive movement founder and menstrual researcher Chella Quint's answers are frank, funny, and fascinating. Let's get period positive. It's about bloody time.
Download or read book The Curse written by Karen Houppert and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2000-05-24 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocative look at the way our culture deals with menstruation. The Curse examines the culture of concealment that surrounds menstruation and the devastating impact such secrecy has on women's physical and psychological health. Karen Houppert combines reporting on the potential safety problems of sanitary products--such as dioxin-laced tampons--with an analysis of the way ads, movies, young-adult novels, and women's magazines foster a "menstrual etiquette" that leaves women more likely to tell their male colleagues about an affair than brazenly carry an unopened tampon down the hall to the bathroom. From the very beginning, industry-generated instructional films sketch out the parameters of acceptable behavior and teach young girls that bleeding is naughty, irrepressible evidence of sexuality. In the process, confident girls learn to be self-conscious teens. And the secrecy has even broader implications. Houppert argues that industry ad campaigns have effectively stymied consumer debate, research, and safety monitoring of the sanitary-protection industry. By telling girls and women how to think and talk about menstruation, the mostly male-dominated media have set a tone that shapes women's experiences for them, defining what they are allowed to feel about their periods, their bodies, and their sexuality.
Download or read book Dignified Menstruation written by Radha Paudel and published by Kathmandu Publication. This book was released on 2020-12-07 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With 40 contributions from more than 20 countries, Dignified Menstruation examines the experiences of both menstruators and non-menstruators with respect to the dignity of menstruation in various circumstances. This book marks a milestone in changing the narrative of menstruation at the individual, family, society and global levels and thereby in achieving the goal of an equal society in which menstruator do not have to feel shamed by this most basic function of life.
