Each of the eight chapters in this volume addresses menstruation and/or menstrual blood in various media sites with a view to answering the question, what does blood perform? Menstrual blood may be enduringly feminine but it is never just one thing. Menstruation Now contains chapters on: the shifting "conversation" of menstruation in contemporary advertising; menstrual blood and the "female complaint" in Alice Munro's short story, "Chance"; the signification of menstrual blood in legal discourse; blood as a para-text in pornographic films; the placement of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's p.

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.

Each of the eight chapters in this volume addresses menstruation and/or menstrual blood in various media sites with a view to answering the question, what does blood perform? Menstrual blood may be enduringly feminine but it is never just one thing. Menstruation Now contains chapters on: the shifting “conversation” of menstruation in contemporary advertising; menstrual blood and the “female complaint” in Alice Munro’s short story, “Chance”; the signification of menstrual blood in legal discourse; blood as a para-text in pornographic films; the placement of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s phantasized menstrual blood in biographies of her; contemporary menstrual art; menstrual blood as liminal space in Ingmar Bergman’s film Cries and Whispers; and, unruly blood in the TV show Orange is the New Black. Blood is performative: disruptive, noisy, aesthetically fluid, difficult to discipline. It can thus, now as always, be performed again in the service of new meanings and experiences.

Examining cultures as diverse as long-house dwellers in North Borneo, African farmers, Welsh housewives, and postindustrial American workers, this volume dramatically redefines the anthropological study of menstrual customs. It challenges the widespread image of a universal "menstrual taboo" as well as the common assumption of universal female subordination which underlies it. Contributing important new material and perspectives to our understanding of comparative gender politics and symbolism, it is of particular importance to those interested in anthropology, women's studies, religion, and comparative health systems.

Across the world, 2 billion people experience menstruation, yet menstruation is seen as a mark of shame. We are told not to discuss it in public, that tampons and sanitary pads should be hidden away, the blood rendered invisible. In many parts of the world, poverty, culture and religion collide causing the taboo around menstruation to have grave consequences. Younger people who menstruate are deterred from going to school, adults from work, infections are left untreated. The shame is universal and the silence a global rule. In It's Only Blood Anna Dahlqvist tells the shocking but always moving stories of why and how people from Sweden to Bangladesh, from the United States to Uganda, are fighting back against the shame.

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.

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.