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accessing the field and data collection Getting to know the menstrual activists, past and present, demanded multiple methods. Since no one had conducted an in-depth study devoted exclusively to menstrual activism, I was aware that a combination of qualitative approaches would be necessary to fully represent and interpret this understudied social movement. Thus this work is at once a textual analysis of movement materials, a sociologically informed ethnography, and a historical investigation that mines archival sources. In the fall of 2002 I began collecting menstrual activist materials, including menstrually themed zines, and exploring e-zines and websites (blogs were just beginning to emerge). Some of the earlier zines were produced in the mid to late 1990s; others were quite recent. Because of their ephemeral nature, I was not always able to secure every zine I had read about in other zines, found in catalogues of zine distribution services (called “distros”), or heard described by activists themselves. Nonetheless, I collected twenty-five zines and ten e-zines or websites (the difference between the two is not always clear) with menstrual heath and politics at their center. Using this material, I performed a textual analysis that enabled me to identify themes threaded through contemporary movement discourse. The textual analysis also helped me locate the movement organizations that feed menstrual activism—women’s health collectives, student environmental groups, artists’ collectives, punk and anarchist groups, and feminist spirituality communities. I invited the creators of the zines, e-zines, and websites I was able to contact for in-depth interviews and interviewed ten of them—my first set of interviews, which helped me hone the questions that drove the next phase of my research project: participant observation. 181 Appendix A. Methods I knew that I, a white, (at the time) forty-two-year-old college professor and married suburban mother of two, would not immediately fit in with hip punk, anarchist, urban young women. I knew our clothes, our hair, our means of making a living, and our musical tastes, at the very least, would differ dramatically (even if many of our social analyses converged). I doubted if I could skillfully minimize those differences and capitalize on our commonalities. My first encounter was with a small group of Boston-based young punk women who founded a short-lived punk rock feminist collective, Moshtrogen. I was interested in this group because they produced a zine that included substantial menstrual health and politics content and they gave local workshops on radical menstruation. I gained access to them through a student of mine, an occasional member of the group, whom I met, my heart beating a mile a minute, at the subway station near the host’s house (a large house shared by several twenty-somethings, both men and women). As we entered the rather roughand -tumble house with a gaggle of bikes nearly blocking the front door, I felt out of place. We sat down in the living room (filled with mismatched secondhand furniture, a painted bed sheet hanging on the wall); my unease grew. As the room began to fill with the collective’s members and in spite of a series of warm greetings, I was aware that my jeans and t-shirt contrasted with the layered and ripped shirts and hoodies, skirts over patched pants, thick boots, creative accessories—many borrowed from little girl culture—and even more creative hairstyles adorning the young women facing me. It was clear that I would have to find a way to connect with my informants without misrepresenting who I was. There was no hiding my age (or my privilege), but I could make it clear that my interest in the work of menstrual activism was genuine and, at the data collection phase at least, I was not in the business of making judgments. The meeting went well (entirely to the credit of my hosts); the young women were forthcoming about their work and excited about my research. They invited me to an upcoming event and promised to add me to their e-mail discussion list. I realized that my enthusiasm for the project was contagious and that I have some cultural capital as a women’s studies professor and a feminist interested in the underground world of radical menstruation. They may have seen me more as a mother figure than as a peer, but at least I was a mother they could talk to. That is, I was cool enough. And so I dug in. I conducted...

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