Ungendering Menstruation

Why and how menstrual pain needs to be incorporated into discussions of gender, embodiment, and disability

Honing a “cranky” approach to being a menstruating body expected to accept and embrace trauma, Ungendering Menstruation examines menstrual suppression, toxicity, and the cooptation of menstrual positivity rhetoric. Drawing on their own experiences as a toxic shock survivor and a menstrual pain and period dysphoria sufferer, Ela Przybyło questions why, on what terms, and for whom menstruation has been fixed around experiences of pain. Instead, they present a vision for menstrual justice that refuses the womaning of bleeding and the further erasure, dismissal, and denial of menstrual pain as real pain.

If menstruating is framed as somatechnically elective, Przybyło contends, it provides avenues for both celebrating and appreciating cultures of bleeding as well as for remaining critical of the ways in which bleeding has been used as a transphobic and sexist tool to fix gender in place.

Ela Przybyło is associate professor of English and core faculty in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Illinois State University. She is author of Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality and coeditor of On the Politics of Ugliness.