Menstrual fictions: languages of medicine and menstruation,c. 1850–1930

Abstract

Gynaecological narratives of menstruation in the late nineteenth century placed woman firmly within the orbit of domesticity by virtue of her biology. In the rhetoric of medical ‘truths’, menstruation was defined as a ‘ldisability’, a physical ‘illness’ and a threat to emotional stability. Thus, it was argued, women could not hope to achieve equality with men when the dictates of Nature (as opposed to society) stipulated that they remain mothers, carers and homemakers. This article explores the notion that narratives of menstruation were created and articulated through subjective readings of social and cultural truths: menstruation was perceived and defined through the medium of ideas relating to what femininity was and ought to be. An examination of the medical languages of menstruation articulated between 1850 and 1930 reveals that the creation of menstrual knowledge was in perpetual flux. What remained a constant, however, was the appropriation of the female body as a field for the definition of ‘difference’     

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The shift to companionate marriage in South Asia and elsewhere is widely read as a move from ‘tradition’ to ‘modernity’ resulting in an expansion of individual agency, especially for women. This paper critically examines the narratives of urban middle-class women in Sri Lanka spanning three generations to illustrate that rather than indicating a radical shift in the way they negotiated between individual desires and social norms, the emphasis on ‘choice’ signals a shift in the narrative devices used in the presentation of the ‘self’. The paper illustrates how young women’s narratives about marriage appear to suggest ‘modernity’ as inevitable—that its processes are reconstituting the person who, less constrained by ‘tradition’ and collective expectations, is now experiencing greater freedom in the domain of marriage. However, it also shows how urban middle-class families in Sri Lanka have collectively invested in the narrative of choice through which ‘a choosing person’ is consciously created as a mark of the family’s modernity and progress. Rather than signalling freedom, these narratives about choice reveal how women are often burdened with the risks and responsibility of agency. The paper illustrates that the ‘choosing person’ is produced through narratives that emphasise agency as a responsibility that must be exercised with caution because women are expected by and obligated to their families to make the ‘right’ choices. Hence, a closer look at the individualised ‘choosing person’ reveals a less unitary, relational self with permeable boundaries embedded within and accountable to family and kinship.     

From Settlers to Strays: white Zimbabwean women,historical memory and belonging in the diaspora c.1980–2010

ABSTRACT

Based on interviews with thirty women, this article examines white attitudes to the coming of Zimbabwe's independence in 1980. As it details, many of the interviewees construct problematic versions of the past, foregrounding what Annie E. Coombes has termed the ‘deceptively benign’ nature of settler colonialism. Through an examination of the context in which the interviews were conducted, the article comments on the mobilisation of certain post-colonial narratives regarding Zimbabwe's recent past. By examining the voices of some of Southern Africa's ‘orphans of empire', it engages with existing literatures on white women and empire, settler colonialism and diaspora studies.     

Learning about “the curse”: An anthropological perspective on experiences of menstruation

Learning about menstruation typically focuses on providing education about the biology and reproductive functions of a woman. This approach ignores individual variations of experience and the social influences in managing the menstrual event. A qualitative study of 20 women was conducted to explore how women learnt about the menstruation and its effect on their lives. With reference to medical discourse and medical anthropology, three themes will be examined: pollution, rites of passage, and the concept of secrecy and social seclusion. These themes are used to explore the role of menstruation in the emergence of female identity, the forces around women that influence their beliefs, and how these women manage their bodies. Some reference is made to the effects of menstruation on a woman's physical and mental health, sexual relationships, and perceived constraints during leisure time. A more phenomenological approach to menstruation should be considered by policymakers interested in “educating” young women about menstruation, where the emphasis should be on addressing women's experiences and concerns.     

“I made myself small like a cat and ran away”: workplace sexual harassment,precarious immigration status and legal violence

This article examines the intersection between workplace sexual harassment, immigration status, and insecure employment status (‘precarious work’). Although a rich body of literature explores how gender impacts all three fields independently, less is known about how they interact. Drawing on narratives from migrant women with precarious immigration status in Toronto, Canada, I propose that experiences of sexual harassment illuminate the workings of migrant illegalization through ‘legal violence’. Furthermore, findings demonstrate that precarious status migrant women do not experience sexual harassment in isolation; other axes of oppression interlock to exacerbate it. Despite this, precarious status migrant women negotiate their experiences, sometimes enduring sexual harassment; referred to here as aguantar, and sometimes resisting it explicitly.     

The New Miss India: Popular Fiction in Contemporary India

Miss New India is the title of a 2011 novel by Indian-born (now American-based) Bharati Mukherjee, which tells the story of a young woman who leaves her small-town home and family to find work in a call centre in the information technology city of Bangalore. The call centre is emblematic of a ‘new India’, in which educated young people seize the possibilities of a global labour market. This is a generation for whom colonialism is ancient history, a generation who have grown up in the aftermath of economic liberalization in India. Chetan Bhagat refers to this generation as ‘Young India’ and has written a series of best-selling novels that feature ambitious young men in the ‘new India’. There is, however, an emerging genre of similar narratives written by women and addressed to a female readership. This article discusses a range of contemporary Indian women’s popular novels and argues that, while Bhagat and his male heroes may embrace globalization and the market, the narratives written by women are more nuanced in their celebration of economic liberalization. The novels dramatize the tensions between tradition and modernity, family and independence, and suggest that these are particularly fraught for young Indian women. These texts pick up on the discourses of contemporary journalism about ‘Young India’, within the generic form of the romance, but their resolutions are repeatedly uneasy and suggest that the ‘new India’ is not an entirely comfortable space for the new Miss India.     

Sustaining Life: Rethinking Modes of Agency in Vulnerability

ABSTRACT

This article discusses ambivalence in the meaning and attribution of agency, and the role it plays in understanding vulnerability as a concept and condition that is specific to individual bodies. This involves examining agency as an embodied resource that vulnerability might draw upon when bodies endure conditions of uncertainty, detention and exile. The documenting of a partial narrative of an individual who set his body on fire provides an analytic lens through which to investigate the complexity and contextual specificities of vulnerability. The article argues that working with a single modality of agency resulting from a certain slippage between meanings of agency, political agency and resistance, might result in foreclosing alternative forms of living and sustaining lives. Agency is considered more expansively as a capacity for action that is necessarily mediated through situated capabilities, struggles and desires. The article argues for the need to analyse concepts held within a ‘grammar of vulnerability’ in order to discuss modalities of agency that capture both activities of resistance, but also other, often unseen, investments in sensory, affective and physical labours required for everyday activities in which individuals sustain their lives.     

THE ‘AUSSIE BATTLER’ AND THE HEGEMONY OF CENTRALISING WORKING-CLASS MASCULINITY IN AUSTRALIA

Abstract This paper explores the ways in which the ‘Aussie battler’ identity of the character Kenny Smyth in the film Kenny (2006) is both visible through its hegemonic status and cultural ubiquity, and invisible as the marker of normative Australian identity. This paper examines the ‘mainstream’ and ‘battler’ identities and the discourse that surrounds them, in particular looking at working-class masculinity which are argued to be both hegemonic and centralising. The paper explores how identities such as these, which exist at the axis of invisibility/visibility, can access narratives of entitlement and marginalisation. As a partially gendered and fully classed construct, the ‘battler’ identity operates within mainstream and mainstreaming culture in often exclusionary ways, denying any real challenge to classed and gendered inequality while using classed narratives to make a claim for more cultural, social and economic space.     

Charismatic women in religion. Power,media and social change

ABSTRACT

‘Charisma’ can be a catch-all term that obfuscates more than it reveals. What it does reveal often says more about the historical and cultural context in which ‘charisma’ was deployed than about its subject. In this introduction we trace the concept’s contextual shifts across its intersections with gender, religion and power. We explore the different ways in which women in the religious sphere have been considered charismatic, thereby addressing Max Weber’s definition of ‘charisma’ as well as its subsequent reinventions in the social sciences and the humanities. Particular focus goes to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the mediatization of ‘charisma’ created new opportunities and risks for women in religion.     

‘Where am I in this story?’ – listening to activist women writers*

This study discusses the dynamic roles of activist women in militarized societies. It offers an analysis of the perspectives of Israeli activist women regarding their roles as women activists and writers. In their non-fiction writings, these activist women voice their resistance and document both their everyday lives and political perspectives about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and their socio-political activism and resistance to the Israeli occupation. These women were interviewed regarding their perspectives and struggles. The interviews were analysed by applying narrative analysis – the ‘Listening Guide’ methodology – to explore their various voices and narratives. By using this methodology, this study sought to uncover additional knowledge regarding women’s forms of resistance in militarized societies. We emphasize the importance of women citizens’ voices, narratives and points of view by presenting activist women’s critical insights on activism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and literature. Their curiosity, agency, critical perspectives, and resistance can be viewed as counter-narratives that de-centre Israeli hegemonic masculinity and demand a critique of the national and militarized ideology. Our article seeks to demonstrate the importance of women’s perspectives, everyday life experiences, dilemmas and struggles in a reality of conflict and war.     

Physical purity feminism and state medicine in late nineteenth-century england

Abstract

Late nineteenth-century England saw the development of a number of campaigns and social movements which were connected by both a hostility towards the medical profession and by the use of discourses of purity and sanitary reform. This article explores the involvement of women within these movements, analysing their activism as an aspect of social purity feminism. It argues that many of these movements drew on widespread female anxiety regarding male violence – both physical and sexual – towards women. The anti-medical feminists claimed that some pieces of ‘sanitary’ legislation represented a state-sanctioned violation of the bodies of women and children. Finally, this article analyses the use made, by some of these activists, of the discourses of sanitary reform to challenge the gender ordering associated with the reason/nature dualism in Victorian society.     

Pain,shame, blood,and doctors: How women with learning difficulties experience menstruation

The concerns of women with learning difficulties are rarely addressed in feminist or disability rights analyses, or indeed in most areas of public debate. It is important that we recognise that women with learning difficulties have unique experiences, and also that they share much in common with other disadvantaged women. This paper addresses the issue of menstruation, an experience common to many women. It describes the findings of a qualitative study of women with learning difficulties' experiences of menstruation. In doing so, it not only provides insights into how they experience this important aspect of their lives, but also reveals something about how they experience being a woman.     

Entering Religious Life,Claiming Subjectivity: Irish nuns, 1930s–1960s

Despite the number of Irish women who entered religious life, especially in the decades following independence, very little is known about their motivations for joining or experiences therein. Based on their oral histories, this article explores how Irish women religious articulated their attraction to religious life. Providing the reader with a contextual background in which to place the narratives, it highlights the significance of several factors affecting the women’s decision to enter and, in particular, illuminates the claims to subjectivity revealed in the women’s accounts. Through varied responses, the women collectively rejected any notion that they were forced into religious life, asserting the decision to enter as truly their own. Comparing the ways the women framed their vocation with their families’ response to it, the article draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic capital to explore the ways in which women are positioned as ‘social objects’ but present themselves as ‘subjects’.     

Doris Arnold: the making of a radio star, 1926–1939

ABSTRACT

Doris Arnold (1904–1967) was a BBC radio personality and the UK’s first female ‘Disc Jockey’. She produced and presented the gramophone record programme These you have Loved from 1938. Despite her fame, Arnold is oddly absent from broadcasting histories and little is known about her today. Hers was one of the best known ‘rags to riches’ narratives of the early BBC: a typist whose musical talent propelled her to stardom. This article explores Arnold’s rise to fame through a detailed evaluation of her personal staff files which expose a complexity of gendered issues including status, clothing and pay.     

Rationalizing pay inequity: women engineers,pervasive patriarchy and the neoliberal chimera

This article argues that neoliberalism with its pervasive patriarchy and co-option of feminism, renders women tacitly complicit in gendered pay inequalities. We show that in New Zealand, one of the world’s most neoliberal nations, women who might precisely be best equipped to argue for equal pay – engineers – do not do so because neoliberalism makes many feel responsible for, and accepting of, their lower salaries. In interviews and focus groups, many women engineers talk of deserving less pay than men because of their ‘choices’, their ‘personality’ and their lack of ‘responsibility’. In a disempowering environment, some women show agency by disavowing gender as a reason for the pay gap. Such narratives of individualized shortcomings reduce hope of collective action that might uncover and dismantle the systemic causes of pay inequity, which are not due to a woman’s choice or personality but rather what we frame as the neoliberal chimera.     

children's imaginings and narratives: inhabiting complexity

Drawing on two studies of children aged between seven and 10 years this article explores their narratives of themselves, families, sibling and peer relationships. Their narratives were full of push-pull and contradictory processes. The children moved towards knowledge as well as a disavowal of ‘reality’ about their families and material conditions. Critically they revealed profound wishes for something better alongside the knowledge that ‘this is it’. This article focuses on theorizing children's understandings of and relationships to social and material life in order to argue that meanings matter and meanings have matter. Narratives are social in two critical ways: they involve reaching out and connecting with others, and narratives are constructed within and through the social sphere, while simultaneously they are shot through with conscious and unconscious fantasies. Children are moving towards being in a complex – engaged in and inhabiting many relationships.     

Unnecessary bleeding,unnecessary suffering: normalcy and necessity of menstruation in promoting NovaSure®

NovaSure® is an endometrial ablation procedure that destroys the inner lining of uterus to stop heavy bleeding. It is performed mostly on women entering menopause who are experiencing irregular and heavy bleeding. In this article, this biotechnology, promoted for women approaching the end of their reproductive life, is analyzed. The analysis is informed by a feminist science studies and medical anthropology background. The discourse of ‘normal’ menstruation and representations of menstruation in the promotional materials for NovaSure® are explored through a textual analysis of the NovaSure® website and patient brochure. The themes in the materials analyzed include the idea of getting back to life, ‘normal’ bleeding, and having a choice among different medical procedures and interventions. The possibility of getting rid of embarrassment that accompanies heavy bleeding is also emphasized. It will be argued that NovaSure® contributes to the redefinition of what is ‘natural’ and ‘necessary’ by combining the ‘unnecessary period’ idea of pills such as Seasonale®, which is aimed toward women in their reproductive years, with the ‘unnecessary suffering’ idea related to menopausal complaints. While advertising the procedure, NovaSure® promotional materials co-construct the ideal user for the technology and reproduce the taboos and embarrassment that accompany menstruation.     

Post-socialist deindustrialisation and its gendered structure of feeling: the devaluation of women’s work in the Croatian garment industry

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the devaluation of women’s industrial work during the transition from market socialism to capitalism in Croatia. On the basis of oral history interviews with former workers from the Arena knitwear factory in Pula, it explores the gendered structure of feeling created by socialist industrialisation, and its transformations during post-socialist deindustrialisation. In socialist Yugoslavia, female industrial workers participated in the discourses and practices of workers’ self-management. Despite their hard work and their low wages, most workers fondly remember the factory as a space of socialisation, solidarity and empowerment. The factory functioned as a redistributive centre for accessing welfare rights. After post-socialist transition, workers experienced worsening social rights, precarity and exploitation as a result of deindustrialisation, privatisation and the neo-liberal withdrawal of the welfare state. Workers’ nostalgic narratives about their work experiences during socialism are mobilised to reclaim the dignity and value of work in post-socialist times.