Abstract
The chapter introduces the reader to the Menstrual Hygiene Management (MHM) movement in the Global South as part of the wider global movement to challenge the silence, secrecy, and shame surrounding this biological process. Through two illustrative stories captured during my research, I preview the conceptual framework that interrogates how MHM frames both problems and solutions associated with girls as menstruators. I aim to show how through the eyes of MHM, risks associated with menstruation are often exaggerated, based on inadequate research and often invoking Western tropes of precarious girlhood in need of rescue. The solutions that follow, I argue, focus too narrowly on getting girls access to commercial menstrual products. These “technological fixes” accommodate the menstrual mandate by helping girls develop their “good” bodies.
From the start, I must make clear that not only girls and women menstruate and not all girls and women do menstruate. Menstrual activists taught me this and inspired my use of the word menstruator when I was conducting fieldwork on the menstrual activist movement in North America (Bobel 2010). Today, I am delighted to see the broad uptake of this gender-inclusive paradigm when considering who does and does not menstruate. But making room for—and driving resources to—gender queer, intersex, and trans menstruators has not yet captured the MHM movement in the Global South and nearly all the organizations I studied for this project referred to menstruators as girls and women. Thus, I will reluctantly refer throughout this book to menstruators as girls and women to reflect the way MHM actors conceptualize the bodies that menstruate.
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Notes
- 1.
In Chap. 8, I briefly address some (rarely mentioned) negative aspects of his invention, including repair difficulties and poor quality of the pads.
- 2.
Coverage includes the quirky story of his wearing a makeshift “uterus” that released pig’s blood so he could test his pads. Additionally, the following sources have all covered Muruganantham: Adweek (2016); The Atlantic (2014), Al Jazeera (2016); Bloomberg (2014), Buzzfeed (2014); BBC (Vibeke 2014); CBC (Chattopadhyay 2016); The Guardian (2012); The Huffington Post (2014); Jezebel (2017); The New York Times (2016 and 2017); NPR (Kurwa 2013); PBS (Etman 2017); Slate (2014); and Smithsonian (2012), to name only a few.
- 3.
- 4.
Links to each of these stories are contained in the references that accompany this chapter.
- 5.
While some MHM campaigns focus on adult women, especially those engaged in paid work and, to a lesser degree, out-of-school girls—the majority target girls in schools.
- 6.
Feminist historian Sharra Vostral is responsible for naming the field “critical menstruation studies,” a field of study that situates menstruation as a category of analysis and coherent and multidimensional transdisciplinary subject of inquiry and advocacy.
Vostral coined the term during a conversation we had in 2016 when we were conceptualizing a handbook intended to capture the state of the interdisciplinary field of research about menstrual health and politics.
- 7.
My appreciation to Ilana Cohen for introducing me to this apt phrase.
- 8.
- 9.
Anne Frank famously referred to her menses as her “sweet secret” (1947/2008, 159). But most menstruators, I venture, would drop the adjective sweet and opt instead for a descriptor far less positive.
- 10.
This lack of clarity is due in part to study complications including high dropout rates of subjects and too-small sample sizes. Furthermore, long-term studies have not been conducted, according to the National Women’s Health Network (https://nwhn.org).
- 11.
In the interest of full disclosure, I co-chaired this conference. I sat on the organization’s Board of Directors from 2005 to 2015. During 2015–2017, I served as SMCR’s president.
- 12.
I detail my research methods in Appendix A: Methods.
- 13.
As I’ve said, I’ve heard this story before (see, e.g., Mccray 2017; Stuteville 2014). Of course it is featured prominently on DfG’s website (https://www.daysforgirls.org/history), and, tellingly, it has gone viral. In some versions of the story, the girls sit on cardboard and wait for their friends to bring them food and water (Frederickson 2014).
- 14.
Menstrual cups are bell-shaped devices typically made of flexible medical grade silicone. Once the cup is inserted into the vagina, it seals against the vaginal walls below the cervix. When full, the user removes, empties, rinses, and reinserts the cup. With proper care, cups can last between five and ten years. According to research conducted by the NGO PATH, there are currently over 80 menstrual cups on the market. Their research also found it takes average user about three to six months to learn to use a cup (Muller 2018).
- 15.
Free bleeding, as the name implies, is menstruating without the use of any menstrual care material, often directly onto one’s clothes, or sometimes, onto the ground. It is an old practice. For example, some historical accounts reveal that only women who bled very heavily used an absorbent. In the nineteenth century, some “feared that any cloth might prevent the menses from flowing” (Crawford 2016, 55). In the contemporary era, however, free bleeding is not the norm, as the media frenzy surrounding a marathon runner’s decision to free bleed during her race testifies. The runner, Kiran Gandhi, has since leveraged her media moment to raise awareness about menstrual stigma (see Gandhi 2015; The New York Times2017). Since then, Instagram posts of free bleeding continue to generate significant debate, including a photo of yoga instructor Stephanie Góngora’s striking a pose in her blood-stained white yoga pants and another of transgender menstrual activist Cass Clemmer staring defiantly into the camera while wearing stained jeans. Clemmer’s image is paired with their original poem describing the challenges of menstruating while trans (Mazziotta 2017). Clemmer has since changed their name to Cass Bliss.
- 16.
But of course, the leak is not the only breach. Even being seen with menstrual care materials puts girls at risk. In the West, this need spurs the development of “quiet wrappers” that enable a menstruator to keep their pad change in a public bathroom their private business. This demand also instigates a tampon product line that cleverly conceals their telescoping tampons in neon bright plastic—to look like candy or a lipstick or….just anything but evidence that the owner is menstruating.
- 17.
Throughout the book, I refer to those who participated in my research—those interviewed as well as those with whom I interacted and observed during my fieldwork— as “participants.” There are many terms used to refer to the people who participate in research. I choose participants as it implies the most active role in the co-construction of knowledge at the heart of qualitative research (see Morse 1991). I discuss other strategic language choices in Appendix B: Notes on Language.
- 18.
I want to acknowledge three other books with similar titles and near conceptual associations with my own. In 1983, Arlie Hochschild published The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, where she advanced the concept of emotional labor based on her study of flight attendants who operated under the stultifying expectations to smile, compliment, and generally appear pleasant at all times. In 2010, Miliann Kang published The Managed Hand: Race, Gender, and the Body in Beauty Service Work, in which she developed the concept of body labor through her study of the race, gender, and class dynamics embedded in service interactions. The concept of management relative to female embodiment is also key to feminist psychologist Jane Ussher’s analysis of the women’s bodies in her 2006 book, Managing the Monstrous Feminine: Regulating the Female Body. Here, she mines a variety of texts as case studies to illustrate how the menarcheal, menstrual, pregnant, and menopausal body are each socially constructed as abject and a site of social control. My own use of “managed” is akin to all three. Here, I use the word to suggest a version of the self-abnegation in deference to social expectations that all three authors explore in the context of menstruation in particular—a biological process with deep social meaning. While I do not explicitly draw on these influential works, I owe a debt of gratitude to the ground they laid.
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Bobel, C. (2019). Introduction: What a Girl Needs …. In: The Managed Body. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89414-0_1
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