Menstruation is insistently material; a slimy red-brown-ish, perhaps lumpy, substance flowing out and creeping up on everyday life in a society expecting exactly this uncontrollable material to be controlled. Menstrual products absorbing and collecting menstrual blood are used to this end, thus deeply entangled with what means to be menstruating. Informed by new materialism, this research conceptualizes menstruation as ‘body-blood-product’ entanglements, or what I theorize as menstrual materialities. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Denmark, this research asks what the menstrual materialities facing women are like and how these shape menstrual experiences and bodily understandings.
Last Updated 06.03.2024