The Managed Body: Developing Girls and Menstrual Health in the Global South

"Chris Bobel is a professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. I’m a huge fan (as I am of everybody on this list!). Bobel has written many books about periods and has long had a really interesting scholarly approach to them. In this particular book, she does what she calls an invested critique of the menstrual hygiene management movement. In particular, the international movement where it’s mostly white Westerners, white women, going into other countries with their imperial feminist thoughts and saying, ‘We know what’s best for you. It’s more period products or more attention to sanitation conditions (or whatever).’ Some of those things may actually be true. The problem is—and this is not a new argument, I was just reading a paper from the 90s, by Antoinette Burton about this—that the project of imperial feminism, of white women going in and imposing their ideas on others, is one that’s been around for over 100 years, if not far more. It deserves being interrogated, because all people can speak for themselves. And when adult women from one culture decide that they know what’s best for the adult women or people of another culture, that’s concerning. They’re not even right all the time. For me, this book was really powerful. I cite and talk about it quite a bit in one chapter of my book. I thought her critique was so skillful. In the vein of what I was talking about with Rebecca Solnit’s book, I think critique is actually optimistic. It offers a path forward toward a better future and demands more of others. That’s what I admire about this book. It isn’t saying, ‘Therefore, you should all do nothing, go leave now.’ Instead, she’s saying, ‘I expect better of all of us. Let’s figure out a path forward.’ Yes. The other piece of her critique—that I don’t talk about as much in my book, but I think is important—is, ‘Why is the solution a capitalist one? Why is it about getting more products to people?’ There are probably some fundamental issues that precede, ‘Here’s a pad.’ Especially considering you need a lot of products to span the entire lifetime of a person who’s bleeding. Instead of a capitalist solution—like ‘Let’s get donations for lots of menstrual cups’ or ‘Let’s teach people how to make pads and then sell them’—what would it look like to think instead about underlying issues? There are different types of interventions other than a capitalist model. Why don’t we address the extraction and genocide that probably characterize why it is that folks are in poverty in the countries that we’re identifying to begin with?"