Menstruation: A Cultural History

Abstract

Andrew Shail and Gillian Howie (eds), Menstruation: A Cultural History , Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Pp. 312. £50. ISBN 1403939357. As Thomas Laqueur has noted, bodily functions such as menstruation ‘must be regarded as a narrative of culture in anatomical disguise’. The contributors to this edited volume take up this directive, focusing on the ways that changing cultural representations of menstruation reflect shifts in thinking about the body, and specifically about sexual identity. The power of these cultural constructions of apparently physiological givens is evidenced by the medieval concept of male menstruation, mentioned in several essays. Associated with Jewish men, this example underscores how biological understandings of menstruation and sexually differentiated bodies are shaped by dominant cultural ideas and discourse. Following a brief introduction, the authors examine menstruation and its contribution to binary and hierarchical sexual definitions of human bodies and to beliefs about women's inferiority based on historical Euro-American materials (with the exception of two chapters on China and South India). The first ten chapters in Part I focus on medical understandings of menstruation in cultures from ancient Greece to the present, while the nine chapters in Part II consider representations of menstruation in literature and popular culture, although these discussions are not mutually exclusive. An appendix that includes bibliographical and archival resources for the cultural historical study of menstruation concludes the volume.

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