Scripting the Body: Pharmaceuticals and the (Re)Making of Menstruation

Abstract

This article provides an analysis of the 2003–4 marketing campaigns for Seasonale, the first extended‐cycle oral contraceptive drug designed to suppress women's and girls' monthly menstruation. Seasonale, we argue, is part of a new class of lifestyle pharmaceuticals, relatively new pharmacological therapies (along with others for the treatment of baldness, sleep difficulties, excessive weight, mild depression, sexual performance, general aging, allergies, etc.) that promise a refashioning of the material body with transformative, life‐enhancing results. Seasonale, as a lifestyle drug for every woman's menstrual suppression needs, not only prevents natural menstruation but also produces natural femininity itself. Drawing on the optics of biomedicalization and embodiment theories, we argue that Seasonale represents a ripe case for pushing our understanding of embodiment‐discourse relations that take nondualistic forms. The advertising campaigns for Seasonale collectively provide theoretical fuel for our analysis that Seasonale—both as medical discourse and practice and as technocultural intervention into biological processes—has corporeal and discursive effects on femininity and ways of understanding and being in the body. By effacing the intended use of traditional, first‐generation pills—to prevent pregnancy—Seasonale produces the nonmenstruating woman as both embodiment and subjectivity.

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