The afternoon my mother first told me I would get my period, we stood under the kind of Texas summer sun that threatened to peel off my skin. I was nine then: my crushes on boys were sexless and based upon who could run the quickest in our PE class. We floated in our slow-leaking inflatable fruit, and my mother told me I would bleed—that it happened so that I could have a baby one day. When we got home, a book sat on my bed: The Care and Keeping of You, with its pictures of vaginas and encouragement that puberty was normal. I was an “early bloomer,” by all accounts, and by the time my mother began to discuss puberty with me, little mounds of flesh were already budding on my chest. I brought the book to school, and my friends and I gathered beneath the swing set to guess what our adult bodies would look like.
It happened on a Tuesday. During a field trip, the aching turned to stabs of a dull blade that drifted like smoke to my eye sockets. I have thought so much about this pain, the way it tilted the world on its axis. A kind-eyed teacher noticed my pain, the migraine now taking root in my temples, as was perhaps apparent from the contorted lines of my mouth. I threw up in the staff bathroom three times before someone noticed the stain. Ten years old and the first in my grade to publicly bleed.
And so it goes: I was a “woman”.
When you research menstruation, people will want to talk to you about everything they read about periods. During this research, my mother sent me an article with research that shows a third of women hide their periods from their partners (Minnett). Four different acquaintances texted me the video of Tiger Woods handing a tampon to a competitor as he passed him at a golf tournament (Chavkin). I messaged my friends with rage, bemoaning the fact that periods are still weaponized to insult men. At academic presentations, parents in the audience ask me what puberty books I recommend for their child. After class, menstruating students tell me that they have put pads in the bathrooms in the library, whispering their success with pride.
However, this research does not predate my talking about periods. I can recount the hushed voices in my middle school hall, the newest girl to fall prey to the monthly woe, discussed like celebrity news. We always knew who to ask for a pad: the other people who knew the sensation of cramps, the erratic emotional landscape, and the feeling of panic at being left unprepared. At sleepovers, girls without their period asked what it felt like to bleed and were surprised to learn that the bleeding wasn’t usually the painful part. As I entered high school, a friend’s missed period was cause for great anxiety, its arrival often a celebration with remarkably high stakes. On average, menstruators will have 480 periods in their life (“Periods and Fertility”). Over the course of those days, menstruators will lose about 2 to 3 tablespoons of blood a day. Some lose more or less, or track their periods only through cramps and headaches. A menstruator may use up to 16,000 tampons in their lifetime (“Periods and Fertility”). Some people lose their period, experience a dip in body weight, or experience a change in stress level, creating a halt in their bleeding. For many, menstruation is a private, sometimes shameful phenomenon. For others, it is the butt of a joke, a reason for marching, a moment of joy, or disappointment. For me, at least now, it is omnipresent.
Despite all of the various discourses, affective expressions, and embodied utterances that emerge when I discuss menstruation in public, one is almost entirely uniform— “and then, I was a woman.” In retelling their stories of menarche—a menstruator’s first cycle—most mention this inexplicable moment that someone in their life asserted their newfound adulthood. “You are a woman now,” someone exclaimed, looking down on their still child-like face. For most, menstruation does not take on a static meaning nor represent a completed journey toward the murky and incomplete specter of “womanhood.” Throughout life, even within individual cycles, menstruation’s meanings are far more dynamic.
I, to illustrate a juxtaposition, begin with these stories to demonstrate how meaningful menstruation is, despite most individuals’ discomfort in discussing it publicly. People feel remarkably comfortable talking about their menstrual cycles to me, but struggle to imagine a world in which they can discuss their menstruation as it is—a regular biological occurrence that affects their life to varying degrees throughout time.
I began studying the language we use around menstruation because of this effect, and the taboos that still govern discussions of periods, despite increased discussions in the public domain. Beyond that, my work makes the case that menstrual justice is reproductive justice, and that reproductive justice requires attention to the vast mechanisms through which reproductive bodies are disciplined and controlled. As developed by women of color activists like Loretta Ross and Dorothy Roberts, reproductive justice recognizes that true reproductive freedom requires not just the right to prevent pregnancy, but the right to have children, parent them safely, and live free from reproductive coercion across all dimensions of reproductive life (Ross 14). Reproductive justice activism has focused primarily on the endpoints of reproduction—birth control access, abortion rights, maternal mortality—while leaving the cyclical processes that signify reproductive capacity (like menstruation) largely unexamined. The oversight is particularly striking given that menstruation constitutes the majority of most people’s reproductive experience. A typical menstruator will have more periods over their lifetime compared to far fewer pregnancies, yet our scholarly and activist attention remains focused on pregnancy as the defining reproductive experience.
Feminist rhetorical scholarship—my discipline– has provided crucial groundwork for this analysis through its attention to how reproductive roles are constructed and contested through discourse. Reproductive rhetorics, this subdiscipline, is the study of reproductive roles, health, capacity, and regulation, and this relatively new field began primarily with discussions of motherhood. Lindal Buchanan’s scholarship is exemplary of this new body of research. Taken together, her monographs Regendering Delivery (2005) and Rhetorics of Motherhood (2013) address the inherent connection between rhetorical capacity and the material reality of the reproductive body. In Regendering Delivery, Buchanan argues that “the ideological components of delivery, a canon traditionally perceived as exclusively material in focus, become apparent only when we consider it from the vantage point of differently located and previously marginalized speakers” (69). Menstruation is similarly constructed in material ways, incurring differing social meanings based on who is menstruating. With this argument, she opens the door for other feminist scholars to examine the intersection of material reality and identity. Buchanan continues to explicitly speak about women’s reproductive roles in Rhetorics of Motherhood, observing that the maternal body is a contested one that creates a “slippery rhetorical terrain for women” (xvii). Within these texts, Buchanan calls feminist scholars to explore further the material and discursive realities of particularly situated speakers, specifically speakers in marginalized groups. In doing so, Buchanan places the female body at the nexus of materially and biologically constructed realities and the social expectations that impact those constructions.
These discussions have since evolved to discuss how motherhood shifts when the role is occupied by different bodies—from teens (Jenna Vinson), immigrant mothers (Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz), unwed mothers (Heather Adams), and would-be mother featured in abortion and prenatal politics (Celeste Condit, Tasha Dubriwny, Nathan Stormer), these scholars assert that reproduction is, and always has been, an intersectional issue. Other scholars in reproductive rhetorics—drawing more from rhetorics of health and medicine- have analyzed the construction of reproductive expectations and systems through language used within medical institutions, and the many spaces in which these discourses are emergent. Many facets of reproduction, such as pregnancy (Marika Siegel), infertility (Robin Jensen), hysteria and hormones (Amy Koerber), and birth (Rachelle Chadwick), involve engagement with the medical institution and deeply entrenched values about bodies and health. Beyond pregnancy and childbirth, there is work to be done within reproductive rhetorics to better account for the entire reproductive life cycle of individuals.
My work takes up much of these calls and applies the theories and logics of reproductive rhetorics to menstruation. The menstrual advocacy that I analyze has an equal investment in ensuring dignity for the individual menstruators, as well as making structural changes through advocacy and self-advocacy. The future of menstrual justice, I have come to believe, lies not in perfecting our approaches to equity but in remaining attentive to the violences that shape how equity is imagined and practiced. We must continue asking not just whether we are achieving menstrual equity, but how. Only by attending to these questions can we ensure that the fight for menstrual dignity becomes part of a broader struggle for reproductive autonomy, for the right to experience our bodies according to rhythms that serve our flourishing rather than structures that would render us predictable, productive, and contained.
References
Buchanan, Lindal. Regendering Delivery: The Fifth Canon and Antebellum Women Rhetors. Southern Illinois University Press, 2005.
Rhetorics of Motherhood. Southern Illinois University Press, 2013.
Adams, Heather Brook. Enduring Shame: A Recent History of Unwed Pregnancy and Righteous Reproduction. University of South Carolina Press, 2022.
Chadwick, Rachelle. Bodies That Birth: Vitalizing Birth Politics. University of Washington Press, 2018.
Condit, Celeste Michelle. Decoding Abortion Rhetoric: Communicating Social Change. University of Illinois Press, 1990.
Dubriwny, Tasha N. The Vulnerable Empowered Woman: Feminism, Postfeminism, and Women’s Health. Rutgers University Press, 2013.
Fixmer-Oraiz, Natalie. Homeland Maternity: US Security Culture and the New Reproductive Regime. Penn State University Press, 2019.
Jensen, Robin E. Infertility: Tracing the History of a Transformative Term. Penn State University Press, 2016.
Koerber, Amy. From Hysteria to Hormones: A Rhetorical History. Penn State University Press, 2018.
“Periods and Fertility.” NHS, www.nhs.uk/conditions/periods/fertility-in-the-menstrual-cycle/. Accessed 9 July 2025.
Ross, Loretta J. Radical Reproductive Justice: Foundations, Theory, Practice, Critique. Feminist Press, 2017.
Siegel, Marika. The Rhetoric of Pregnancy. University of Chicago Press, 2014.
Stormer, Nathan. Sign of Pathology: U.S. Medical Rhetoric on Abortion, 1800s-1960s. Penn State University Press, 2015.
Vinson, J. Cherie. Teenage Pregnancy and Motherhood: A Life Story Analysis. Routledge, 2012.
Thank you so much for sharing your story and expertise, Dr. Taylor! Your Writing Reproductive Justice class is such a fascinating and important one for first-years! I continue to learn so much from you that informs my work in global health!