Chris Bobel

Breanne Fahs

Tomi-Ann Roberts

Inga T. Winkler

Katie Ann Hasson

Elizabeth Arveda Kissling

The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies

Samantha Kwan

Combines ethnographic research with personal stories to provide a portrait of the daily lives of people who defy or violate the rules and conventions of the social norms regarding body modification, piercings and tattoos.

Challenging the Norms, Breaking the Rules

Embodied Resistance

Single or married, working mothers are, if not the norm, no longer exceptional. These days, women who stay at home to raise their children seem to be making a radical lifestyle choice. Indeed, the women at the center of The Paradox of Natural Mothering have renounced consumerism and careerism in order to reclaim home and family. These natural mothers favor parenting practices that set them apart from the mainstream: home birth, extended breast feeding, home schooling and natural health care. Regarding themselves as part of a movement, natural mothers believe they are changing society one child, one family at a time. Author Chris Bobel profiles some thirty natural mothers, probing into their choices and asking whether they are reforming or conforming to women's traditional role. Bobel's subjects say that they have chosen to follow their nature rather than social imperatives. Embracing such lifestyle alternatives as voluntary simplicity and attachment parenting, they place family above status and personal achievement. Bobel illuminates the paradoxes of natural mothering, the ways in which these women resist the trappings of upward mobility but acquiesce to a kind of biological determinism and conventional gender scripts.

Paradox Of Natural Mothering

New Blood offers a fresh interdisciplinary look at feminism-in-flux. For over three decades, menstrual activists have questioned the safety and necessity of feminine care products while contesting menstruation as a deeply entrenched taboo. Chris Bobel shows how a little-known yet enduring force in the feminist health, environmental, and consumer rights movements lays bare tensions between second- and third-wave feminisms and reveals a complicated story of continuity and change within the women's movement. Through her critical ethnographic lens, Bobel focuses on debates central to feminist thought (including the utility of the category "gender") and challenges to building an inclusive feminist movement. Filled with personal narratives, playful visuals, and original humor, New Blood reveals middle-aged progressives communing in Red Tents, urban punks and artists "culture jamming" commercial menstrual products in their zines and sketch comedy, queer anarchists practicing DIY health care, African American health educators espousing "holistic womb health," and hopeful mothers refusing to pass on the shame to their pubescent daughters. With verve and conviction, Bobel illuminates today's feminism-on-the-ground--indisputably vibrant, contentious, and ever-dynamic.

Third-Wave Feminism and the Politics of Menstruation

New Blood

Embodied Resistance engages the rich and complex range of society's contemporary "body outlaws"--people from many social locations who violate norms about the private, the repellent, or the forbidden. This collection ventures beyond the conventional focus on the "disciplined body" and instead, examines conformity from the perspective of resisters. By balancing accessibly written original ethnographic research with personal narratives, Embodied Resistance provides a window into the everyday lives of those who defy or violate socially constructed body rules and conventions.

This open access handbook, the first of its kind, provides a comprehensive and carefully curated multidisciplinary and genre-spanning view of the state of the field of Critical Menstruation Studies, opening up new directions in research and advocacy. It is animated by the central question: ‘“what new lines of inquiry are possible when we center our attention on menstrual health and politics across the life course?” The chapters—diverse in content, form and perspective—establish Critical Menstruation Studies as a potent lens that reveals, complicates and unpacks inequalities across biological, social, cultural and historical dimensions. This handbook is an unmatched resource for researchers, policy makers, practitioners, and activists new to and already familiar with the field as it rapidly develops and expands.

The Managed Body productively complicates ‘menstrual hygiene management’ (MHM)—a growing social movement to support menstruating girls in the Global South. Bobel offers an invested critique of the complicated discourses of MHM including its conceptual and practical links with the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) development sector, human rights and ‘the girling of development.’ Drawing on analysis of in-depth interviews, participant observations and the digital materials of NGOs and social businesses, Bobel shows how MHM frames problems and solutions to capture attention and direct resources to this highly-tabooed topic. She asserts that MHM organizations often inadvertently rely upon weak evidence and spectacularized representations to make the claim of a ‘hygienic crisis’ that authorizes rescue. And, she argues, the largely product-based solutions that follow fail to challenge the social construction of the menstrual body as dirty and in need of concealment. While cast as fundamental to preserving girls’ dignity, MHM prioritizes ‘technological fixes’ that teach girls to discipline their developing bodies vis a vis consumer culture, a move that actually accommodates more than it resists the core problem of menstrual stigma.

Developing Girls and Menstrual Health in the Global South

The Managed Body

"Chris Bobel is a careful ethnographer, respectful of research participants, and while she clearly takes a stand on menstrual activism, she handily defends her proposition that feminism is `finding its balance between reliving its past and creating its future.' Bobel's work, which includes incisive analysis of how third-wave, activists incorporate and update tactics and strategies of the second wave, will be a welcome addition to the scholarship of feminism." Elizabeth Kissling, author of Capitalizing on the Curse: The Business of Menstruation New Blood offers a fresh interdisciplinary look at feminism-in-flux. For over three decades, menstrual activists have questioned the safety and necessity of feminine care products while contesting menstruation as a deeply entrenched taboo. Chris Bobel shows how a little-known yet enduring force in the feminist health, environmental, and consumer rights movements lays bare tensions between second and third-wave feminisms and reveals a complicated story of continuity and change within the women's movement. Bobel focuses on debates central to feminist thought (including the utility of the category "gender") and the challenges to building an inclusive feminist movement. Filled with personal narratives, playful visuals, and original humor, New Blood reveals middle-aged progressives communing in Red Tents, urban punks and artists "culture jamming" commercial menstrual products in their zines and sketch comedy, queer anarchists practicing DIY health care, African American health educators espousing "holistic womb health," and hopeful mothers refusing to pass on the shame to their pubescent daughters. With verve and conviction, Bobel illuminates today's feminism-on-the-ground---indisputably vibrant, contentious, and ever-dynamic.

Chris Bobel

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