Kate Clancy's Reading List

"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?"

"Bodyminds Reimagined is by disability studies scholar, Sami Schalk, who’s at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I’ve admired her work for a long time and I’ve assigned a lot of her readings in classes that I’ve taught. As we talked about before, the big picture meaning of my book is this idea that we should be imagining different futures. Black feminist speculative fiction is where we can get some of the best and most hopeful ideas for what our future could be. I’ve been a fan of the Parable of the Sower for a really long time and Octavia Butler is one of the main authors that Sami works on in this book. We should be paying more attention to reading and learning from and lifting up the voices of Black feminist speculative fiction writers and folks like Professor Schalk, who are so brilliant in their analysis of this work. What’s so important about this is that it’s pushing back against the idea that we’re going to fix gender injustice or sexism by saying, ‘This group can now do everything this other group can do.’ What that often requires is making invisible what makes us different, or hiding or concealing things that might challenge us to exist in a world that wasn’t made for us. Schalk really insists that you can’t get rid of sexism by suppressing periods indefinitely and creating womb incubators. You can’t just take reproduction and put it away and that’s how you solve the problem. The future is going to be messy. The future is going to include real bodies. How are we going to manage that? We can’t just all sit in a cubicle and sip Soylent all day, as much as some tech bro in Silicon Valley might want that. The main one is Kindred by Octavia Butler and then Stigmata by Phyllis Alesia Perry . She also does some work analyzing N.K. Jemisin, Shawntelle Madison and Nalo Hopkinson. I don’t know if you’ve ever read any N.K. Jemisin or Nalo Hopkinson but they’re amazing. A lot of what she does is show that disability is going to exist in the future. You can’t disappear ableism by just saying, ‘We’re going to have a medicine for that one day.’ A lot of these works reckon with, ‘What will it be like when these bodies actually have to manage?’ In some ways, you could read the main character’s experiences in N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy that way. She has these powers, but she also has a disability associated with them. There’s a lot of mental strain associated with her powers. Certain children, if they’re very powerful when young, have a lot of mental strain that goes with it. She resists the idea that we can just fix things—that we can fix an oppressive system within our culture by erasing a difference. Which is a good segue to the next book."

"The connection between Schalk and Liboiron’s work is this insistence that you can’t fix things by just moving them away. The desire we often have to fix pollution is, ‘Okay, here’s the recycling bin, and that will take our plastic away.’ Plastic never leaves. It never degrades. Every time we make plastic, we are committing to that plastic existing on our planet for the rest of time, effectively. Max’s work really shows the naivete of how we think about pollution and how the first solutions that we so often come up with, especially in Western science narratives, are always, ‘Let’s get it out of our context and put it somewhere else.’ We don’t think about the fact that we moved the factory, so now it pollutes somebody else’s community, or that when we put the landfill over here, the waste leaks into the groundwater and affects this other community. We don’t pay factory workers enough, some of them commit suicide or die, or don’t have enough wages to feed their families. There is a real need for us to imagine greater interconnection, and to stop creating solutions that are all about assuming access to land that isn’t ours and extracting resources without a mind to the consequences of it. Despite these very heavy messages, Max also manages to be very light. The footnotes are amazing in this book. They are a whole book unto themselves, sometimes, longer than the text itself on a given page. They are righteous and friendly and offer a different approach or are talking a little bit to a different audience. She knows most of her readers will be white, but she sometimes has footnotes that say, ‘This is for my fellow Indigenous peeps.’ The art of what she does with this, not to mention the thinking behind it, is why I try to put this book into the hands of pretty much everyone I know. Except that in some ways there is. A chapter that we ended up pulling from the book, but I wrote as a feature for American Scientist last year, was about pollution and disposable products for menstruation. The way we tend to think is, ‘How can we manage periods to make them invisible so we can go exist in the world?’ We tend to prioritize, ‘What are the most effective products that sop up my period blood and keep it from being visible to other people?’ In doing so, we are producing more and more disposable products that are harmful to the planet. Also, the people who are making these products are not thinking about our health and safety. These products contain VOCs, they contain phthalates: there was just that settled lawsuit showing that PFAS are present in Thinx underwear. We are exposing ourselves, on our thin genital skin, to plastics that then get absorbed into our bodies and live in us forever and have profound health consequences—all in the name of using the most absorbent thing that will keep periods from being seen. So, in a lot of ways, pollution is connected to menstrual justice, because the decisions we make about the products that we use do have those consequences. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . At the same time, her systemic approach—and what I offer, I hope, in my book—is around not telling people this is what you personally should or shouldn’t do. As much as it’s important for all of us to try to make good choices, we need to turn our eyes upward and say, ‘What are the systems in play? What can we do to effect change in a capitalist system that is trying to extract money from us, and give us these products that may be super absorbent, but are not super safe, and have profound negative consequences for the environment as well as our health? And how can we be putting more thought into that and pressuring these companies to make different decisions?’ We have a history of that. With Toxic shock syndrome (TSS), it was feminist activists who were the ones who first noticed what was going on. That was a book I almost put on this list: Toxic Shock: A Social History by Sharra Vostral . It’s the whole history of the feminist activism that got us to recognize the problems with superabsorbent tampons and how that was leading to TSS. Well, those warnings were because of Esther Rome and other feminist activists at the time, who made sure that we all knew there was a problem and changed how we categorize and standardize the absorbency of tampons. So Sharra Vostral has another book, Under Wraps . It’s another book I almost put on this list. It looks at menstrual technologies. Blood Magic and Chris Bobel’s work also cover the reusable rags and absorbent fabrics that people used to use. They’re not as absorbent as a disposable pad, but if you swap them out often enough, you can make do. One of the things that’s amazing about menstrual technologies—but again, has gotten us into the pickle we’re in—is that because they weren’t that good people really did remove themselves from modern life when they were menstruating. You would wear an absorbent fabric between your legs, then you’d wear rubber underwear over it, or a rubber apron that was supposed to protect your skirt from getting blood on it. That’s how you protected yourself and tried to keep from showing that you had menstrual blood. If you were a heavy bleeder, that was pretty much always insufficient. That’s why I think we have to have a nuanced approach to thinking about menstrual technologies and why I would never tell somebody, ‘Listen, you just can’t use disposable pads anymore because they’re bad.’ Without them, many people couldn’t exist in public while menstruating. I couldn’t: I bleed way too much. So sure, I could sit in bed for the first three days, and just bleed on myself and use inferior products in terms of their absorbency. Or I could use ones that are worse for the environment and worse for me but allow me to be out in public. There isn’t really an in between right now. There are some reusable things like cups, but not everyone tolerates them very well."

"Leslie is also a professor here at the University of Illinois and a person I’m a super fan of. She’s a professor of history, and there are two books of hers I was trying to decide between. There’s this book and then there’s her other book, When Abortion Was a Crime , which is a history of abortion from the 1800s through to the 1970s here in the US (though she mentions some other Western countries). Dangerous Pregnancies is the story of how people came to realize that rubella causes birth defects. It was actually mothers who noticed first. I feel a lot of time is spent talking about how mothers are over-worriers or obsessed with their children or their pregnancies. There are two reasons why it makes sense for them to be. One is that the medical system doesn’t actually care that much about them. In the US we have one of the highest rates of maternal mortality out there. We kill moms on the regular and we don’t seem to feel that bad about it. So there are ways in which it makes sense for pregnant people to really pay attention to their bodies. Also, children are deeply underserved. In the US, we are closing pediatric hospitals, pediatric units and NICUs all over the place because they aren’t profitable enough. So what happens when your child is really, really sick? We have a healthcare system that only cares about the most profitable parts of healthcare, not things that will prevent kids from dying. It took a significant amount of time between moms noticing that if they had rubella while they were pregnant their child might be born blind or die, for people to pay attention. They said it enough times to enough people. The first person who really believed them seems to be a doctor in Australia, Norman Gregg. This book is so powerful because it shows how important it is to respect people when they say, ‘No, something’s wrong. I don’t care what your tests say. I don’t care what your belief is about rubella being a minor disease. This is wrong.’ And it’s because of this that the rubella vaccine was able to be fast-tracked, and implemented as quickly as it was. In my book, I talk about our research on COVID vaccines and menstrual changes and my lab’s principles around the art of noticing. This book really shows, in so many ways, why it’s so important to pay attention to what a patient says. No, but there is a connection to health, to medicine. What moves me about this book is the incredible detail, compassion and attention that Dr. Reagan puts on all these parents who said, ‘No, my kid deserves something better. And I deserve something better because I don’t want this to happen again.’ Mothers were saying, ‘Nobody is protecting me. I’m going to get rubella and my kid is going to die.’ For me, I also see a connection with our current pandemic. We’ve stopped caring about how many people we’re killing. If you look at the death rates, they’re still very high. If you look at the infection rates, they’re still very high. And yet people are acting like they don’t care. Every person who doesn’t care and goes indoors unmasked risks transmitting the disease to a pregnant person, or an immune-compromised person. It’s perpetuating a pandemic and incredible harm. And yet, we’ve all decided we’re okay with it. I still mask indoors everywhere; I still can’t wrap my mind around the fact that we’ve decided we don’t care about our fellow human beings. We now know that COVID during pregnancy could cause microcephaly in babies. We now have two cases at the University of Miami showing that there is a link. We also know that getting COVID while you’re pregnant increases your risk of miscarriage, stillbirth, preeclampsia and intra-uterine growth restriction. We’re exposing pregnant people every day to a disease that causes harm to the parent and causes harm to the fetus. We’ve known about this since 2020 and nobody gives a shit. We’ve known for three years what we’re doing to pregnant people and we don’t care. That’s why I’m curious when I look at this book, and how we actually cared. We fought to come up with a vaccine to stop transmission of rubella to protect pregnant people and fetuses and children. Today, we don’t have that for COVID. Most pregnant people don’t even know that every time they go out unmasked or the people around them don’t bother masking, they are exposing themselves to the risk of stillbirth, miscarriage, preeclampsia, intrauterine growth restriction and microcephaly. So yes, my book is about periods. But it’s also about what it means to care about people. And that I think we should care about people more than we do."