Price: $24.95
Page Count: 181
Publication Date: April 2019
ISBN: 978-1-77258-188-1
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.
This book is not only smart, it is fun. It flirts with the margins of discourse on women's bodies, and then breaks their hearts. It ranges across time and form, drawing from multiple disciplines and forging connections among them. Students and professors of feminism in all fields will find things to delight them. Patriarchy, watch out: there will be blood!
-- Kate Kane, Ph.D. Department of Communication, Media, and Theatre
Northeastern Illinois University
As the menstrual activist movement grows and mainstreams, so does the appetite for menstrually-themed scholarship. The menstruating body is, after all, a rich site for understanding juicy concepts like womanhood, agency, viability, legitimacy and respectability. In this engaging and sometimes surprising collection, readers will find lots to chew on as they explore the many ways texts shape, reflect and resist cultural scripts about embodiment.
-- Chris Bobel, author of *The Managed Body: Developing Girls and Menstrual Health in the Global South*
Introduction Berkeley Kaite
Chapter 1 Bloody Jackie: how menstrual blood speaks for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s silence
Chapter 2 “Who is That ‘She?” Narratives of Menstruation in the Terri Schiavo Case
Chapter 3 Period Porn: Menstrual Blood at the Margins
Chapter 4 “Changing the Conversation” about Menstruation from “Very Personally Yours” to #ItsNotMyPeriod: A Discursive Analysis of Menstrual Products and Advertisements
Chapter 5 The Contemporary Art of Menstruation: Embracing Taboos, Breaking Boundaries, and Making Art
Chapter 6 Menstruation and Liminality in Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers
Chapter 7 “The Problem was that she was a girl”: The Female Complaint in Alice Munro’s Juliet Triptych
Chapter 8 Orange Is the New Black: Menstruation, Comedy, and the Unruly Feminine
Berkeley Kaite is Associate Professor in the Department of English at McGill University. She has written on pornographic magazines, the iconography of Jacqueline Onassis, the photographs of Sally Mann, among others.
