#denaturingthebody

Over the past several months, I’ve been doing some pretty extensive research on the new trend of “alternative period protection.”  I have always been slightly troubled by this word “alternative.”  If using pads and/or tampons represents to us becoming the Olympic athletes they show in commercials who use tampax and can still be as feminine as they want while on their periods, is that what we want?  I have never experienced any particular urge to become any more feminine or sexy during my period, though the advertisements that go along with standard products seem to indicate that periods always prevent that.  However, when I look at menstruation and the female body from the Jewish perspective, all explanations indicate that periods are “dirty,” “impure,” and “bad.”  I’ve been wondering how these alternative menstrual products are working to combat period negativity, while also remaining highly feminine in most cases.  I’ve included below a link about the ancient Jewish laws on menstruation and purity.  I don’t know how reliable the website is in general, but it’s explanation of Niddah (menstruation) and ritual purity are accurate.

“Niddah in a Nutshell The Old Testament stipulates a woman is unclean during menstruation, but the Talmud stipulates her period of uncleanness lasts for an additional week after menstruation has ended. Niddah is the word used to denote the menstruating woman and her period of uncleanness. The niddah defiles everyone and everything she touches. She may not have sexual intercourse with her husband. If she does, he is subject to arrest and perhaps the death penalty. Some niddah laws apply to Gentile women, too.”

My thoughts on this are unorganized and under developed, so I decided to share a couple articles (about the best PMS movies) that I thought were ridiculous, funny, and relevant. However, I will try to organize my few thoughts below. And as a disclaimer, I anticipate I’ll be taking a somewhat oppositional position to a few specifics of the arguments and material this week, and that’s mostly to serve as Devil’s advocate and only minutely influenced by some tiny unformed, and uninformed perceptions I have in my head.

The TED talk that Cara posted really struck a chord with me when Robyn Stein DeLuca shared the study that found that men and women both experience mood swings just as often. Growing up with sisters and friends who had periods, I would always hear them blaming any kind of negative emotion they experienced on their periods. This really rubbed off on me.

For nearly my entire adolescence and even into college I experience terrible mood swings that I would always blame on my “man period”. My best friend (who is a cis-gender woman) and I would always joke about how our cycles are sinked whenever my ‘man’ period would match with hers. 

Looking back, I was literally appropriating an excuse that negates women's emotions/mental health to negate my own. Because I never took my mental health seriously, I never sought help until symptoms got much worse. 

Last class we talked about postmodernism and asked: what is the value of deconstructing norms? I have been sitting with this, thinking about the fact that without putting anything in place of the subjective categories we have made, what really are we doing? Donna Haraway reiterates this in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature when she writes that "Feminists have to insist on a better account of the world; it is not enough to show radical historical contingency and modes of construction for everything. Here, we, as feminists, find ourselves perversely conjoined with the discourse of many practicing scientists, who, when all is said and done, mostly believe they are describing and discovering thins by means of all their constructing and arguing” (187). 

This makes sense when watching the Ted Talk for this week, in which Robyn Stein Deluca makes it clear that PMS is really just a way to invalidate women and more importantly to profit off of them. I remember taking Women and Health with Professor Jordan-Young my Sophomore year. I remember because I am pretty sure it was the most disturbing course I have taken in college career. While prior WGSS courses had worked to deconstruct societal constructions such as gender, sexuality, and race, I had never (literally never in my life) come across the idea that science was constructed as well. It was extremely hard to wrap my head around and honestly slightly traumatic. If I could not trust something seemingly objective like science, what could I trust? How unstable is Trump (no I know he is the actual worst)? Are my professors lying as well? etc.. 

This sentiment, combined with Cara’s posts about the Tuskegee Syphilis experiments and vaccination science turns my own personal discomfort into outright fear. Sometimes I feel so truly scared that my convictions, understandings of the world, and consequent actions are actually extremely harmful. In other words, I often question whether or not how I live my life is actually progressive or am I actually just feeding into complete capitalist and powerful mythology? If I had lived in the past, would I be able to identify the actual horror of certain ‘objective’ practices? 

I think about this a lot especially when I acknowledge what Seyla Benhabib affirms Wendy Brown’s piece “Postmodernism Exposures, Feminist Hesitations”: "After all, the most ardent feminist poststructuralists do not claim that women's pervasive economic subordination, lack of reproductive freedoms, or vulnerability to endemic sexual violence simply evaporates because we cannot fix or circumscribe who or what 'woman' is or what it is that 'she' wants. Certainly gender can be conceived as a marker of power, a maker of subjects, an axis of subordination, without thereby converting into a 'center' of 'selves' understood as foundational” (40). In other words, I could understand that PMS was a myth, but I could not reconcile the myth with the very real fact that I did experienced a heightened sense of emotion, increasing back pain, nausea, and mood swings right before starting my period. I felt like a bad Feminist (not to invoke Roxane Gay) for “experiencing” PMS.