Guarding gender, race, and nation: a rhetorical history of menstrual containment

In the last decade, menstrual politics have emerged as fundamental to global conversations about bodily autonomy. “Tampon tax” protests, surveillance of menstrual cycles in the wake of the Dobbs decision, and an Academy Award-winning documentary about menstruators in India are some examples illustrating that menstruators, their bodies, and their livelihoods are precarious. Further, these occurrences underscore the cultural forces animating the various ways that menstruators and their periods are contained; that is, framed as dangerous and controlled accordingly.

This dissertation contextualizes the contemporary moment by exploring menstrual discourses in the United States from the 1870s to the 1970s. I illustrate how menstruation came to be seen as something necessitating containment and argue that this notion emerges through broader gender-making and race-making projects within the national body. Menstrual containment is often weaponized to protect the reproductive ability of white, cisgender, middleclass women and constrain the reproductivity of menstruators belonging to populations imagined as threatening or excessive. At the same time, strategies of menstrual containment, such as the use of menstrual products, enable certain women to achieve social status by, for instance, working outside the home or participating in recreational sports. My research evaluates both the oppressive and liberatory functions of containment. I examine archival sources ranging from medical journal articles to activist works to product reports, tracing the way menstrual containment takes on different meanings as power shifts in the relationship between menstruators, their bodies, and others, such as medical professionals and educators, who claim “expertise” about menstruation.