Truth Scribbled in Blood: Women's Work, Menstruation and Poetry

Abstract

Inspired by Hélène Cixous's ‘The laugh of the Medusa’, this paper revisits a public uproar over menstruation in the workplace triggered by a statement from the CEO of New Zealand's largest body of private sector employers, that periods make women take more sick leave than men. The utterance triggered an astonishing outpouring of public discussion and writing about working while menstruating, as well as about productivity and equal pay. We discuss how a comment about women's periods ruptured the status quo of menstrual repression by using selected online posts rendered as poems. Then, drawing on Cixous and the idea of poetic rapture, we discuss women's online writing in tandem with feminist writing on menstruation. In our theoretical reflections we consider how poetry, menstruation and social media can ‘make trouble’ for regimes of power. We argue that menstruation should be a required topic for organizational studies.

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