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I
It starts as a nagging, slow, tugging sense of pain, a presence, a reminder, a low ache, a warning that it will grow, and worsen, and twist its way through my body. It is an animal reminder of the body and its remarkable ability to command my attention. The pain evades language, showing itself in wave after wave as it slowly, perceptibly, tears its way out.—b.f.
II
Menstrual chronicity has a complex somatechnical life. On the one hand, the menstrual event has been laden with pathologizing language in Western culture. Since the 1970s, feminists have observed the ways menstruation has been deployed to prove women's biological limitations, limitations supposedly imposed by the body itself, and thus evidence of women's inherent defectiveness (Steinem 1978; Aristotle in Dean-Jones 1994, 191). Menstruation and menstruating bodies have a rich history of misogynist denigration founded on ideas that menstrual blood, in distinction to other blood, is dirtier because it stems from a "failed" reproductive cycle that did not yield an embryo (Martin 2001). Menstrual blood elicits disgust, hate, and revilement and necessitates containment and sanitization, a fact that menstrual activists and menstrual artists have effectively spoken against in recent years (Bobel 2006, 2010; Fahs 2016b; Truax 2017).
Amid this overwhelmingly negative status that menstrual blood holds in Western contexts, the pain of menstruation has been curiously absent from both feminist work on menstruation as well as popular discussions of menstruation more broadly. Despite the discourses problematizing menstruating bodies, menstrual pain (dysmenorrhea) as well as endometrial pain have been denied the status of real pain. Few affordances, especially in Western contexts, are made in social life or in the workplace for bodies experiencing the cyclic chronicity of menstrual pain. Pain associated with menstruation is routinely dismissed as a woman's problem or as psychosomatic—invented or imposed by the mind onto the body. For example, as Cara Jones (2016) argues in her recent work on the necessity for feminist disability studies to explore the pain of endometriosis, which often intensifies during menstruation, medical accounts of endometriosis are routinely labeled by medical studies and professionals as "malingering," poor lifestyle management, punishment for belated childbearing, or simply a sideeffect of menstruation. Only recently has some attention been paid to menstrual...