Empowerment, destigmatization and sustainability: the co-construction of reusable menstrual technologies in the context of menstrual activism in Argentina (original) (raw)
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Sex Roles, 2006
An in-depth content analysis of five web sites and eight paper zines (self-produced and distributed magazines) was conducted to uncover the inspiration, content, and unique strategies associated with text -based contemporary menstrual product activism. Menstrual product activism is loosely defined as various attempts to expose the hazards of commercial "feminine protection" to both women's bodies and the environment and the promotion of healthier, less expensive, and less resource-intensive alternatives. This activism's discourse draws on many traditions to produce its resistance to mainstream menses management. The movement, first and foremost, is the legacy of several decades of related activism, dating to the mid1970s. Contemporary menstrual product activism updates and modifies this tradition with the "do it yourself" ethic and anti-corporate philosophy of Punk culture and Third Wave feminist ideals of anti-essentialism, inclusion, humor, irony, and reappropriation. To date, this activist agenda has received little scholarly attention, yet it promises to yield meaningful insight into so called Third Wave feminist theory and practice and reveal the resilience of a woman-centered modern history of resistance.
The paper explores how humans intra-act with self-tracking technologies, reconfiguring the plurality of expert and lay knowledge. In particular, the current contribution presents an empirical analysis of the use of apps to manage menstrual periods. The article is positioned at the crossroad between three literatures: actor-network theory; new relational materialism; and a sociomaterial perspective on the medical field as relates to self-tracking practices. These approaches contribute to pay attention on the processes of embodiment and embodied knowing situated into sociomaterial practices. The aim is to explore how the body learns "to be affected" through the material entanglements between humans and apps, and how selftracking technologies are engaged and provide support for processes of embodied knowledge. Research findings draw attention to how interviewees intra-act with apps for menstrual tracking, along an imaginary continuum at whose opposite points we can find -on the one hand -minimal engagement with the knowledge inscribed in the app and -on the other -an affective engagement with the knowledge suggested by the app. This continuum shows the overlapping intra-actions that perform embodied knowledge about how women fertility, subordinate to the various historical stereotypes, works.
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This article traces my personal and academic journey through two 'IUDs in Me' interlacing personal encounters with the IUD with formal research findings from academic work. I demonstrate that reflecting on my own embodiment of the IUD while conducting academic research on the same technology helped me understand how social and historical conditions constructed my reproductive choice as an American consumer of the device and how such 'choice' is constrained by the scientific community's willingness to develop birth control methods, medical practices, and corporate profitability. Personally enjoying the IUD and benefiting from studying it academically, I was faced with a moral dilemma between my own empowerment and the disempowerment that many other women experienced in relationship to this technology. As a way to hold my personal body politics accountable towards feminist struggles for reproductive freedom, this essay scrutinizes my bodily experiences by reading them critically against socio-historical and political contexts. I contend that such reflexive embodied scholarship helped illuminate how 'differences' among women were implicitly calculated and actively configured by IUD developers, who constantly revamped the research and discourse around the device over the last several decades in response to changes in social interests, political stakes, and scientific findings. I argue that my reflexive and embodied feminist technoscience studies led to a fruitful theoretical investigation into how the creation of various 'ideal' users mirror the transnational political economy of women's bodies.
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Menstrual cyber-activism: feminism in social networks
PAAKAT: Revista de Tecnología y Sociedad, 2019
This article analyzes the use of digital platforms by feminist communities and women who focus their work on the dissemination of the naturalization and depathologization of the female body and the menstrual cycle. This cyberactivism proposal poses among its objectives the questioning of the blood taboo in order to transform the menstrual experience of young and adult women. They promote the use of ecological technologies and propose corporal and appropriation ways through feminine representations linked to a feminized notion of the sacred, a question that characterizes the female spirituality of alternative bases and ecofeminism in its symbolic constructions. Through digital ethnography and multisite ethnography, this article analyzes the ways in which menstrual cyber-activism is configured from the social networks, the symbols, discourses and narratives that these groups and profiles use to achieve their objectives, as well as the interweaving of feminist, ecofeminist and spiritual discourses on corporal appropriation, self-knowledge and self-care.
Technoscientific challenges in feminism
Proceedings of the …, 2009
Script is a productive figure to inscribe and analyse gender and diversity in design. This paper addresses one risk of the use of script in our desire to design for gender and diversity. We locate our discussion of this risk in two design perspectives, 'design from nowhere' and 'design from somewhere'. With the help of two vignettes we discuss how 'design from nowhere' was perceived as a perspective to de-gender-ise and de-culture-ise design. 'Design from somewhere', we argue, may result in a freezing of gender and identity in time and place. We propose a more open perspective, not yet 'nowhere' or 'somewhere', and we show how the notion of intra-action may be more productive in understanding how we keep the multiplicity of gender and diversity visible in the design process. We show this with an example of the object-oriented analysis and design practice. Lastly, we focus on the accountability of the designer, who, as a modest witness, has particular responsibilities in bridging partial knowledges and keeping those knowledges visible in the design process.
The Messy Politics of Menstrual Activism
The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies, 2020
In this chapter, Bobel and Fahs first describe a brief history of menstrual activism alongside its more recent iterations in both policy and radical social activism. They review the collective call to reduce stigma and shame around menstruation as part of the enduring project of loosening the social control of women’s bodies. The authors then turn to an analysis of menstrual humor, menstrual art, and menstrual activism today, respectively. This is followed by an examination of the hazards and possibilities of doing menstrual activist work, including politics of menstrual language and the trivializations and hostilities that can plague this work. Finally, Bobel and Fahs offer a politically charged outline for the future of menstrual activism.