The material-material menstruation: theorizing the material boundaries of material-discursive materializations

Relational ontologies present bodies as ever-fluid, forever subject to material-discursive re-materializations. Yet there is something solid to materiality, a brute thereness, existing and challenging exactly this open-endedness of new materialist writings. This paper theorizes this insisting materiality as material-material qualities, using the example of menstruation, arguing that the material-material qualities of menstrual products constrain how material-discursive bodies materialize. It contributes to new materialist theorization of bodies by providing an analytical anchor in the ongoing string of material-discursive materializations, dissecting materiality within, but also across, bodies. The paper builds on ethnographic fieldwork, multiple in-depth material interviews with 15 Danish menstruators focusing on their uses of various menstrual products and more than 150 anonymously submitted photos of menstrual blood. It will be argued that material-material qualities emerge relationally between materials. Material-material qualities describes what happens when a material touch, push or clash with another material. As menstrual blood for instance meets a disposable pad, the pad’s absorbency is revealed - not what this absorbency means (that is the realm of the material-discursive), but what it does. The material-material solidifies over time through countless intra-actions materializing something, not differently, but as the same over and over, and this material-material quality thus comes to persist across different phenomena. Absorbency thus exists across various uses of pads, materially constraining how bodies and menstruation materializes. The material-material analysis is thus fugitive for critically examining and changing the ways in which matter comes to matter.