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Reorganizing menstruation explores what happens when menstrual practices change, and what is revealed and made possible when longstanding menstrual stigma is disrupted.
List of contents
- 1: Organization and menstruation
- 2: Theorizing menstruation
- 3: Reorganizing menstruation through work and time: A case study on a menstrual workplace policy
- 4: Reorganizing menstruation through products and blood management: A case study on the menstrual cup
- 5: Creating a feminist methodology for menstruation
- 6: Habitus and ethos in the remaking of menstruation
- 7: Deepening solidarity and expanding permissions
- 8: Redistributing boundaries, capitals, and labour
- 9: The movement towards a menstrual commons
About the author
Lara Owen is recognised internationally for her pioneering and continuing work on menstruation. She holds a PhD in menstrual organization from Monash Business School, is a founding member of the Menstruation Research Network (UK), and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews. Dr Owen's fieldwork has explored menstruation across a wide range of contexts in the UK, USA, and Australia. Her first book on the topic, Her Blood Is Gold, published in 1993, continues to be issued in new editions. She lectures internationally and teaches a Master's level course in Contemporary Menstrual Studies to students worldwide.
Summary
Reorganizing menstruation explores what happens when menstrual practices change, and what is revealed and made possible when longstanding menstrual stigma is disrupted. Menstruation matters: how it is perceived and practiced gives us important information about society and how people and bodies are treated. Menstrual norms tell us whether cultures value or dismiss the female reproductive body, women's pain and suffering, sustainability concerns, and the cyclical rhythms that underpin life on Earth. Despite menstruation being a culturally complicated and ubiquitous experience of female embodiment, few feminist theorists have tackled the topic directly.
This book develops feminist theory and methodology to offer an innovative socioeconomic perspective on the everyday experiences of managing menstrual blood and menstruating at work, based on empirical research conducted in Australia and the UK on the menstrual cup and the menstrual workplace policy. The core argument of the book is that while contemporary menstrual innovations are often aligned with neoliberal capitalist values of individualism and efficiency, they also demonstrate a challenge to these same values in radical ways, away from profit-driven enclosure of the female body and towards a 'menstrual commons'. Menstrual innovations therefore offer information about how we might reshape-or be already in the process of reshaping-current norms of commodification, capitalization, and embodiment more broadly.
