More than Medical, More than Mechanical: Zine Exploring Knowing and Being in a Menstruating Body
More than Medical, More than Mechanical: Zine Exploring Knowing and Being in a Menstruating Body
Submitter: Jessica T Eng, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, 4jessicaeng@gmail.com
Abstract:
The concept of a “pain-free period” stages two realities: one with pain and one without. Each one refuses the other. Rather than existing in either, the multiplicitous experience of a menstrual cycle is shaped by a web of relations consisting of at least physiological demands, humans detached from those demands, and nonhuman members of moral and political associations. Material and contraceptive technologies embedded in discourse mediate the relations. Understandings of embodied experience are mechanized while dissonances between experienced and desired states of being and knowing persist. An economic and social organization that necessitates standardization renders experiences unintelligible, inconvenient, and “other.” What can we learn about power relations from more-than-medical meanings of pain? How can new modes of shared understanding enable us to, in the words of Helen Verran, “go on well together in difference?” The zine is a place for menstruators to test strategies for making intelligible their own embodied experiences. Both changing the collective and changed by its circulation, it is a playground for the reconfiguration and reframing of social and personal interfaces and engagements.
Areas of STS Scholarship: Method and Practice, Feminist STS, Forms and practices of expertise
Authors/Participants: Jaxon Silva, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
Nicole Herhusky, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
