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65 Nineteen-year-old Kami McBride was ill. It was 1981. When McBride sought medical advice, four different doctors told her she was simply manifesting the stress of a recent breakup, on top of college finals. While McBride acknowledged that stress is undoubtedly implicated in numerous health problems, she was not satisfied with this explanation. So she consulted a nurse practitioner and started to get different answers. Ultimately, a CT scan identified a tumor on her pituitary gland that McBride believed was linked to high dosages of estrogen-based birth control. During surgery to remove the tumor, the surgeon had to lift the front of her face to access the difficult-to-reach tumor. “When all was said and done, I had a different face than when I started,” remembers McBride. Looking in the mirror at her altered nose and mouth, Kami McBride decided to pursue alternatives to hormonal birth control. She could no longer ignore the warnings attached to various birth control methods, even as many of her friends continued to take oral contraceptives and hope for the best. But McBride did not want to surrender her body to medical experimentation or to settle for the convenience of certain birth control methods at the expense of her health. From that point forward, she became deeply interested in what she described as “the possibility to create a different experience of health” and placed herb study at the core of her exploration. Following the lead of holistic health advocates Tamara Slayton, Jeannine Parvati Baker, Rosemary Gladstar, Jane Bothwell, and Vicki Noble, McBride began to realize that is was possible to disengage from the dominant paradigm of health care that disenfranchises women and replace it with one that relies on ancient traditions, informed embodied self-awareness increasingly dubbed “body literacy,” and holistic women-centered healing. During her training, McBride had a second pivotal experience; this one awakened her to the links between the politics of women’s health and the role of menstruation. During the lunch break of a class with herbalist Jane Bothwell, the R c h a p t e r 4 Feminist-Spiritualist Menstrual Activism R students went swimming to beat the heat. When McBride declined an invitation to join everyone in the water because she was menstruating, her teacher encouraged her “just do what we do—bleed on the ground and wash it off in the pond.” McBride recounts her epiphany: “I don’t really remember anything else we talked about that weekend, but that statement rocked my world. Something cracked open and I saw that the shame around my blood was part of what kept me suppressed in general. . . . It was on this summer day that I realized how political women’s health issues were.” These two experiences changed McBride’s life in profound ways. Since 1988 she has taught a full schedule of women’s health classes. In 1994 she founded a herb school, which she built on a pristine patch of northern California forest. Her classes include a yearlong workshop, “Cultivating the Medicine Woman Within,” and a three-day workshop, “Women’s Wisdom: Health and Well Being for Menstruation, Fertility, and Menopause.”1 McBride is a member of one of the two wings of the menstrual activism movement . I call the members of her wing “feminist-spiritualists”—menstrual activists who work to reclaim menstruation as a healthy, spiritual, empowering, and even pleasurable experience for women. Though the women I place in this category are diverse in their approaches, tactics, and philosophies, they coalesce around their common reframing of menstruation and effecting attitudinal change, woman by woman. Feminist-spiritualist menstrual activism is largely ideological and individualized , approximating what Anthony Giddens calls “life politics,” a form of activism—rising out of late modernity’s altered boundaries of social action—that concentrates on the everyday conditions of people’s lives. In Giddens’s formulation , life politics differs markedly from what he calls “emancipatory politics,” more conventional quests for social equality. Key to his concept is the link between the self and the global context. Self-reflexivity does not occur in a vacuum but is connected to systems on the global scale: “Life politics concerns political issues which flow from processes of self-actualisation in post-traditional contexts, where globalising influences intrude deeply into the reflexive project of the self, and conversely where processes of self-realisation influence global strategies.”2 In other words, the global shapes the personal, and the personal...

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