Christina Bobel is an associate professor for Women’s Gender and Sexualtiy studies at University of Massachusetts-Boston, and the President of the recently created “Society for Menstrual Cycle Research.” She has just written a book, and curriculum on the topic – and is planning on introducing it to college classrooms across the nation.
Bobel’s book “The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstrual Studies” is expected to be finished by 2020, with the intent to be “animated by the central question: what new lines of inquiry, including research questions and social justice engagements, are possible when we center our attention on menstrual health and politics across the lifespan?”
The aim of this handbook is to quickly establish the subject of “‘critical menstrual studies’ as a coherent and multidimensional transdisciplinary subject of inquiry and advocacy, one that enables an exciting epistemological clarity and potential,” proposal for the book says. “Attention to menstrual issues across the lifespan surfaces broader societal issues and tensions, including gender inequality, practices and discourses of embodiment, processes of radicalization and commodification, and emergent technologies as read through various disciplines and inter disciplines.”
Another professor involved with this project is Sharra Vostral, a professor of history at Purdue University. Vostral notes, “We have a long way to go,” she said. “In spite of increasing media attention to menstrual issues, menstrual stigma is powerful and enduring. If we treated bodily functions like menstruation as regular then we, our work would be done. But we don’t—we shame, silence, judge, contain, control, and so on.”
The handbooks are supposed to be of “high-quality, original reference works that bring together specially-commissioned chapters, cutting-edge research, and the latest review articles in their fields.” However, it just sounds like the same old feminist, Alt-Left claptrap as always…
