Menstrual materialities: an ethnographic study of Danish menstrual experiences and bodily understandings

This paper takes a new materialist perspective on menstrual experiences and builds on ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews with 15 women in Denmark. The aim of the paper is to understand what the menstrual materialities facing women are like and how these shape menstrual experiences and bodily understandings. The paper demonstrates how menstruation is insistently material; a slimy red-brown-ish, perhaps lumpy, substance flowing out and creeping up on everyday life in a society expecting exactly this uncontrollable material to be controlled. Menstrual products absorbing and collecting menstrual blood are used to this end, thus deeply entangled with what means to be menstruating (Kissling 2006). Drawing on new materialist scholars, this paper theorizes menstruation as a material event, understanding “the relationship between discourse and matter [in a way] that does not privilege the former to the exclusion of the latter” (Alaimo and Hekman 2008, 6). Taking materiality seriously is not only a matter of looking differently at the menstrual products so central to periods, but to acknowledge the thingness of humans too, “the ‘stuff’ of the body – fleshy, biological, material body” (Valtonen and Närvänen 2022, 162) and the ways in which these human and non-human things are intertwined. As Valtonen and Närvänen (2022) point out “It is, after all, not always clear where the body begins and where it ends”(162) and this study finds the same to be true for the menstruating body, why menstruation is conceptualized as ‘body-blood-product’ entanglements, or what I theorize as menstrual materialities. Based on the findings, the paper unfolds the menstrual materialities making up everyday life with menstruation in Denmark and shows how these are key for understanding menstrual experiences and thus potentialities for improving menstrual well-being in the future.