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28 In The Curious Feminist, Cynthia Enloe asserts the need to develop a feminist curiosity, which begins with “taking women’s lives seriously.”1 This essential and focused attention, she argues, is not simply an act of valorization, but an earnest reckoning with all kinds of women in all kinds of places and times. When we take women’s lives seriously, we attend to the gaps and the absences in women’s lives, and accordingly to their consequences. Close attention to menstruation, for example, can reveal much about cultural values and identities. Some feminist analyses already point to the wide-ranging social and personal implications of this biological event. For example, Karen Houppert’s 1999 journalistic exposé of the FemCare industry lays bare the stealth (her word) tactics used by purveyors of tampons and pads to teach women the importance of cultural practices that, she asserts, rely explicitly on the consumption of products, in spite of their questionable safety profile. Building on Houppert’s work and situating a critique of corporate control of the menstrual body in an existential feminist framework following Simone de Beauvoir, Elizabeth Kissling argues that “the social construction of menstruation as a woman’s curse is explicitly implicated in the evolution of woman as Other.” In fact, “menstruation does not make woman the Other; it is because she is Other that menstruation is the curse.” Kissling analyzes the Feminist Engagements with Menstruation I know no woman—virgin, mother, lesbian, married, celibate—whether she earns her keep as a housewife, a cocktail waitress, or a scanner of brain waves—for whom her body is not a fundamental problem: its clouded meaning, its fertility, its desire, its so-called frigidity, its bloody speech, its silences, its changes and mutilations, its rapes and ripenings. There is for the first time today a possibility of converting our physicality into both knowledge and power. —Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born c h a p t e r 2 R representations and discourses surrounding menstruation because menstruation refracts the status of women in contemporary culture. Alice Dan (cofounder of the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research, an interdisciplinary network of menstrual cycle researchers and activists founded in 1979) and her colleague Linda Lewis chime in: “The menstrual cycle not only is a central aspect of women’s lives, but it also offers a model to researchers who want to understand relationships between mind and body, and between social meanings and individual experience.”2 Despite menstruation’s centrality, even our language fails to represent it adequately , as linguist Suzette Haden Elgin knows. When she invented a woman’s language in 1984, Láadan, she included words that capture women’s diverse experiences of embodiment: to menstruate, to be pregnant, to menopause. For example, “husháana” means to menstruate painfully; “desháana,” to menstruate early; “weshana,” to menstruate late; and—my favorite—“ásháana,” to menstruate joyfully. In Láadan, a woman can “azháadin”—menopause uneventfully .3 Láadan constructs an alternate reality that challenges the dominant cultural narrative. But feminists such as Elgin are relatively rare; indeed, feminist scrutiny of the politics of menstruation pales in comparison to feminist engagements with other aspects of women’s lives. The feminist response to political issues centering on menstruation has largely been avoidance. Alice Dan remembers a reputed biologist and founder of the Association for Women in Science who declined an invitation to give a keynote talk at the first interdisciplinary menstrual cycle conference in 1977 because “she believed it was unwise to focus on things that make us different than men” because “they will use it against us.”4 I presume she was cautious of going “down there”—into the dark and dangerous essentialist territory where women are reinscribed forever as linked to (and thereby trapped by) their bodies . Not much has changed. Just a few years ago, when I submitted the title of a talk sponsored by feminist faculty at a liberal arts college in the Midwest, I was asked to eliminate the word “menstruation” for fear that it would cause trouble for the college’s press office. But there is another kind of trouble: feminist priorities in a universe of seemingly endless gendered injustices. One of the first questions after I gave a talk on this book in progress was posed to me by a well-respected historian: “Your work is really interesting, but with all the other issues women face, why choose menstruation ? Aren’t there more important things for feminists...

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