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

"Start by pouring a generous amount of dark sirup and then add red fruit coloring and gravy brown-ng as you like. Try to aim for a color you recognize from your own period, it doesn’t have to be perfect, the aim of the exercise is to reflect upon what menstrual blood actually looks like."
This paper unfolds the potential of the above sticky sugar mass or what I call theatre menstrual blood. It presents how treating it as a research companion may open up other-wise inaccessible spaces. Because new materialist ethnographic research on reproductive entanglements faces a dual problem of inaccessibility; unable to observe the practices unfolding in these intimate spheres, as well as an obvious inability to interview the agentic technologies and bodily materials. They depend on humans to speak up for them, a painful acknowledgement for researchers as I, intending not to privilege discourse over matter. The aim of this pa-per is thus to develop an ethnographic posthuman method overcoming this seemingly inherent distance between discourse and matter in new materialist research. The paper builds on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews with 15 women in Denmark that asks what the menstrual materialities facing women are like and how these shape menstrual experiences and bodily understandings.
As I am introducing the above creative exercise of mixing theatre menstrual blood to Heidi, a 43-year-old woman, she initially bursts into a big laughter. However, as I finish talking, she comes silent and considerately says: “but that’s very different depending on what day [of the period] it is”. She goes on carefully mixing the sirup, food coloring and gravy browning, discussing the materiality of her menstrual blood – volume, textures, colors and smells – with me. While the mundane nature of the ingredients creates a ‘safe space’ to explore an otherwise perhaps intimidating, intimate and disgusting bodily material such as menstrual blood, this exercise is anything but inert. This sticky sugar mass demonstrates how non-humans are differently than I capable of asking material questions and travelling into otherwise closed intimate spaces and back into the interview situation. As no new materialist ethnographic research stands outside the researched matter, researching about is also always researching with. This paper thus argues that it is time the ‘missing masses’ are invited in and that these research materials are not considered any less vibrant than the ones that are the object of the study.
On this backdrop this paper contributes to posthuman methodology, finding that by making menstrual materialities research companions, not only new opportunities of access arise, but also new ways of knowing the technologies and bodily materials of reproductive entanglements. Building on new materialism the human body is found to also always be a non-human body in becoming and without solid boundaries. The same is true for the menstruating body whose fluidity depends on menstrual technologies as pads, tampons, menstrual cups and period panties to control the menstrual blood in accordance with social norms. Menstruation is thus conceptualized as ‘body-blood-product’ entanglements, or what I theorize as menstrual materialities.
This paper thus invites discussions on how we can come to know these lively materials? If prompting these non-humans to speak up and act in our research is a solution? And how we may do so?