Docile Cycles: Bleeding and the Embodiment of Oppression Katie Von Wald
I remember the exact outfit I wore on my first day of sixth grade. A long, maxi, jean skirt from the Old Navy and a hand-me down Michelle Branch tshirt from a much cooler, older cousin. I remember the feel of anxiety when I entered my new school, when I found my first-ever locker, and when I sat down in what felt like a very grownup middle school classroom. I also remember the gut wrenching fear that started midway through my second class. The slow-burning panic that set in as I came to realize that something was terribly wrong. I could feel it seeping, spreading, marking me every long minute that passed. When class finished, I rushed to the bathroom, hot with shame, to find I had gotten my long-prophesized first menses. I had bled through my layers of clothing and stared at the bright patch of wet redness that stained my skirt. It was nothing if not cliché and horrifying. I use this example, from the archives of my own embarrassment, at once to illuminate the often fraught and complicated relationship between menstruators and menstruation, but further to show that the experience of our bodies is foundational for our understanding of the world. All of this, becomes additionally troubling when such bodies are targets of oppression. These intersections along the boundaries of the body intertwined with cultural and social constructions so as to make up the body from pieces of individuated experience, habituated cultural practices, and discipline. Oppression embodied then objectifies the body characterizing experiences as the constant molding, shaping, and hiding of undesirable, non-normative functioning. Menstruation, and the management of it, becomes an example of the overall structures of power working through the body as a means for social and cultural hegemonic control. In this way, menstruation can be a lens through which to examine the experience of oppression as a constant and objectifying project working on the body and shaping the subjectivities of the oppressed. I will begin by providing a general context for situating the body and experience as a productive site for knowledge and discourse. From this background of the body within theory, I will use Michel Foucault’s book Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison, as a means to lay out a framework for understanding the body as a site for the enactment of social control and power. Here the body becomes regimented and disciplined as a means to justify modes of structural oppression. I will then go on to
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