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135 When I first encountered the menstrual activism movement, I wasn’t surprised when I scanned the human landscape. Almost immediately I detected something similar between the menstrual activists and the natural mothers, a variant of mother activists I studied several years ago. In fact, I am quite certain that my fascination with natural mothering led me—with almost magnetic force—to the Bloodsisters who introduced me to menstrual activism. During the mid-to-late 1990s I researched a loose network of mothers who embody a feminist critique of the denigration of women as mothers. Through alternative mothering practices, these women resist mainstream consumerism and the commodification of the body, the family, and the home. In my book that grew out of that research, The Paradox of Natural Mothering, I describe these natural mothers and interpret their back-to-basics, low-tech style of parenting as a paradoxical attempt at social change at the microlevel. While the mothers work to transform society one family at a time, they reify traditional gender norms rooted in essentialism and deference to nature. There are definite connections between the menstrual activists and the natural mothers. Both movements embrace notions about bodies, health care, and consumerism that radically depart from the norm, enacting what Amy Richards and Jennifer Baumgardner call “everyday acts of defiance.”1 All thirty-two natural mothers I interviewed were white, almost all were college graduates (and many held advanced degrees), and most were married to men (and financially supported by their husbands’ white-collar employment) and owned their own homes.2 These data led me to argue that it takes privilege, or more precisely, Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “cultural capital,” to adopt a lifestyle that violates dearly held and deeply entrenched cultural norms of parenting.3 Natural mothering is high-risk activism. Breastfeeding a three-year-old in public, for example, can (and does) elicit negative responses. Choosing alternative health care over Making Sense of Movement Participation c h a p t e r 6 R conventional options (such as refusing to treat a child’s ear infection with antibiotics ) often meets resistance from mainstream health-care providers and even friends and family. So it made sense to me that the natural mothers are, for the most part, a privileged lot. Their privilege not only affords them access to the world of alternativity, but also protects them from the public censure that women with less cultural capital stand exposed to. As I set about contacting and interviewing menstrual activists around the country, I wondered if a similar demographic profile would emerge, so I probed those I interviewed to reveal whom they saw as movement participants. One of the first interviews I conducted was with web-based menstrual activist Carol Church, who posted her (now defunct) e-zine The Whirling Cervix online. When I asked Church to describe “a typical menstrual activist,” she offered the following: “I’d say that they tend to be environmentalists, feminists, matter-of-fact about sex and their bodies, and perhaps a little inclined to be the type who likes to shock people (not excluding myself here!).”4 Based on the contacts I had made at that point through my fieldwork, I agreed with Church. I assumed that menstrual activists were risk takers and taboo smashers, women (and a few men) who felt bold enough to, as one activist put it, “make something private so public.” Given this profile, the menstrual activists struck me as very similar to the natural mothers, so I expected to see white, middle-class, heterosexual women leading the charge to promote an alternative menstrual consciousness. And for the most part, I did. But as I slowly accumulated demographic information from the activists I interviewed, a slightly different profile emerged. Most were white (88 percent), identified across the class spectrum (31 percent self-identified as working, poor, or lower class and 47 percent identified as middle class), and were college educated. Nearly all, as I expected, were women (94 percent).5 But something surprised me: More than half the informants I had interviewed by the midpoint of my data collection identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer. Of those who fell into the LGBT category, most identified as queer. The second-largest number within this category chose an unconventional description of their sexual orientation, including “ambiguous,” “undefined,” and “no distinction.” Several self-identified as “questioning.”6 Ultimately, 63...

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