Everyday Discourses of Menstruation

Everyday Discourses of Menstruation PDF Author: Victoria Louise Newton
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137487755
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Menstruation is a topic which is both everyday and sensitive. From Leviticus to Pliny, to twentieth-century debates around 'menotoxin', to advertising and 'having the painters in', Victoria Newton's book offers a lively and innovative exploration of the social and cultural dimensions of menstruation. Through in-depth interviews with men and women, the book explores the many different ways in which this sensitive topic is spoken about in British culture. Looking specifically at euphemism, jokes, popular knowledge, everyday experience and folklore, the book provides original insights into the different discourses acting on the menstruating body and encourages debate about how these help to shape our everyday attitudes towards menstruation.

Everyday Discourses of Menstruation

Everyday Discourses of Menstruation PDF Author: Victoria Louise Newton
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137487755
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Get Book Here

Book Description
Menstruation is a topic which is both everyday and sensitive. From Leviticus to Pliny, to twentieth-century debates around 'menotoxin', to advertising and 'having the painters in', Victoria Newton's book offers a lively and innovative exploration of the social and cultural dimensions of menstruation. Through in-depth interviews with men and women, the book explores the many different ways in which this sensitive topic is spoken about in British culture. Looking specifically at euphemism, jokes, popular knowledge, everyday experience and folklore, the book provides original insights into the different discourses acting on the menstruating body and encourages debate about how these help to shape our everyday attitudes towards menstruation.

The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies

The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies PDF Author: Chris Bobel
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9811506140
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1041

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Book Description
This open access handbook, the first of its kind, provides a comprehensive and carefully curated multidisciplinary and genre-spanning view of the state of the field of Critical Menstruation Studies, opening up new directions in research and advocacy. It is animated by the central question: ‘“what new lines of inquiry are possible when we center our attention on menstrual health and politics across the life course?” The chapters—diverse in content, form and perspective—establish Critical Menstruation Studies as a potent lens that reveals, complicates and unpacks inequalities across biological, social, cultural and historical dimensions. This handbook is an unmatched resource for researchers, policy makers, practitioners, and activists new to and already familiar with the field as it rapidly develops and expands.

The Managed Body

The Managed Body PDF Author: Chris Bobel
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319894145
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
The Managed Body productively complicates ‘menstrual hygiene management’ (MHM)—a growing social movement to support menstruating girls in the Global South. Bobel offers an invested critique of the complicated discourses of MHM including its conceptual and practical links with the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) development sector, human rights and ‘the girling of development.’ Drawing on analysis of in-depth interviews, participant observations and the digital materials of NGOs and social businesses, Bobel shows how MHM frames problems and solutions to capture attention and direct resources to this highly-tabooed topic. She asserts that MHM organizations often inadvertently rely upon weak evidence and spectacularized representations to make the claim of a ‘hygienic crisis’ that authorizes rescue. And, she argues, the largely product-based solutions that follow fail to challenge the social construction of the menstrual body as dirty and in need of concealment. While cast as fundamental to preserving girls’ dignity, MHM prioritizes ‘technological fixes’ that teach girls to discipline their developing bodies vis a vis consumer culture, a move that actually accommodates more than it resists the core problem of menstrual stigma.

Men and Menstruation

Men and Menstruation PDF Author: David Linton
Publisher: Visual Communication
ISBN: 9781433150418
Category : Men
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Though a biological characteristic, menstruation is also a complex social construction, one that men play an active role in creating via a process of "menstrual transactions." This book explores the means by which menstruation is given meaning through an examination of a wide variety of such transactions.

Girls in Power

Girls in Power PDF Author: Laura Fingerson
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791480976
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
Girls in Power offers a fascinating and unique look at the social aspects of menstruation in the lives of adolescent girls—and also in the lives of adolescent boys. Although there has been much research on other aspects of gender and the body, this is one of the few books to examine menstruation and the first to explore how it plays a part in power interactions between boys and girls. Talking openly in single- and mixed-gender settings, individuals and groups of high school–age girls and boys share their interpretations and experiences of menstruation. Author Laura Fingerson reveals that while teens have negative feelings about menstruation, teen girls use their experiences of menstruation as a source of embodied power in their interactions with other girls and with boys. She also explores how boys deal with their own reduced power. The book extends our theoretical and analytical understanding of youth, gender, power, and embodiment by providing a more balanced view of adolescent social life.

New Blood

New Blood PDF Author: Chris Bobel
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813547547
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
"Chris Bobel is a careful ethnographer, respectful of research participants, and while she clearly takes a stand on menstrual activism, she handily defends her proposition that feminism is `finding its balance between reliving its past and creating its future.' Bobel's work, which includes incisive analysis of how third-wave, activists incorporate and update tactics and strategies of the second wave, will be a welcome addition to the scholarship of feminism." Elizabeth Kissling, author of Capitalizing on the Curse: The Business of Menstruation --

The Modern Period

The Modern Period PDF Author: Lara Freidenfelds
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801892457
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
Winner, 2010 Emily Toth Award for Best Book in Women’s Studies, Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association The Modern Period examines how and why Americans adopted radically new methods of managing and thinking about menstruation during the twentieth century. In the early twentieth century women typically used homemade cloth "diapers" to absorb menstrual blood, avoided chills during their periods to protect their health, and counted themselves lucky if they knew something about menstruation before menarche. New expectations at school, at play, and in the workplace, however, made these menstrual traditions problematic, and middle-class women quickly sought new information and products that would make their monthly periods less disruptive to everyday life. Lara Freidenfelds traces this cultural shift, showing how Americans reframed their thinking about menstruation. She explains how women and men collaborated with sex educators, menstrual product manufacturers, advertisers, physical education teachers, and doctors to create a modern understanding of menstruation. Excerpts from seventy-five interviews—accounts by turns funny and moving—help readers to identify with the experiences of the ordinary people who engineered these changes. The Modern Period ties historical changes in menstrual practices to a much broader argument about American popular modernity in the twentieth century. Freidenfelds explores what it meant to be modern and middle class and how those ideals were reflected in the menstrual practices and beliefs of the time. This accessible study sheds new light on the history of popular modernity, the rise of the middle class, and the relationship of these phenomena to how Americans have cared for and managed their bodies.

Toxic Shock

Toxic Shock PDF Author: Sharra L. Vostral
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479815497
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
A history of Toxic Shock Syndrome In 1978, doctors in Denver, Colorado observed several healthy children who suddenly and mysteriously developed a serious, life-threatening illness with no visible source. Their condition, which doctors dubbed ‘toxic shock syndrome’ (TSS) was rare, but observed with increasing frequency over the next few years in young women, and was soon learned to be associated with a bacterium and the use of high-absorbency tampons that had only recently gone on the market. In 1980, the Centers for Disease Control identified Rely tampons, produced by Procter & Gamble, as having the greatest association with TSS over every other tampon, and the company withdrew them from the market. To this day, however, women are frequently warned about contracting TSS through tampon use, even though very few cases are diagnosed each year. Historian Sharra Vostral’s Toxic Shock is the first and definitive history of TSS. Vostral shows how commercial interests negatively affected women’s health outcomes; the insufficient testing of the first super-absorbency tampon; how TSS became a ‘women’s disease,’ for which women must constantly monitor their own bodies. Further, Vostral discusses the awkward, veiled and vague ways public health officials and the media discussed the risks of contracting TSS through tampon use because of social taboos around discussing menstruation, and how this has hampered regulatory actions and health communication around TSS, tampon use, and product safety. A study at the intersection of public health and social history, Toxic Shock brings to light the complexities behind a stigmatized and under-discussed issue in women’s reproductive health. Importantly, Vostral warns that as we move forward with more and more joint replacements, implants, and internal medical devices, we must understand the relationship of technology to bacteria and recognize that both can be active agents within the human body. In other words, unexpected consequences and risks of bacteria and technology interacting with each other remain.

Blood Stories

Blood Stories PDF Author: Janet Lee
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317958837
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
Blood Stories focuses on menarche as a central aspect of body politics in contemporary US society, emphasizing that women are integrated into the social and sexual order through the body. Using oral and written narratives of 104 diverse women, the authors address the central question of how menarche as a bodily event signifying womanhood takes on cultural significance in a society that devalues women. Exploring issues of contamination and concealment and the sexualization of women's bodies that occurs at menarche, the authors emphasize how the politics of gender are negotiated on/through women's bodies.

The Body in Society

The Body in Society PDF Author: Alexandra Howson
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745676367
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
In everyday life we are not, for the most part, actively conscious of our bodies or the bodies of others – we simply take them for granted. This new edition of a lively introduction to the sociology of the body examines what certain aspects of our bodies, such as the size, shape, smell and demeanour, reveal about the social organization of everyday life and how the body is crucial to the way we engage with the world and the people around us. The human body is endowed with varied forms of social significance which sociology has addressed by asking questions such as: To what degree do individuals have control over their own bodies? What interest does the state have in regulating the human body? How significant is the body to the development and performance of the self in everyday life? What images of the body influence people’s expectations of themselves and others? Written in a clear and comprehensible way, The Body in Society introduces students to the key conceptual frameworks that help us to understand the social significance of the human body. This second edition has been thoroughly updated to take into account recent theories and debates and also includes enhanced pedagogical features. Using familiar examples from everyday life, such as diet and exercise regimes, personal hygiene, dress, displays of emotion, and control over bodily functions, coupled with examples from popular culture, the text has strong contemporary relevance and will strike a chord with all who read it. This book will be essential reading for students taking courses on the body in sociology, anthropology, gender studies and cultural studies.