Period 39: How to think not what to do
This week for my Feminist Science seminar we read Michelle Murphy’s work on pollution and the alterlife, and Jamie Haverkamp’s work on love-care-response as a feminist Indigenous approach to participatory action research in a climate crisis. Murphy reminds us that there is never a better past to go back to; our lives are irreparably polluted, altered. Towards the end of the piece, she writes:
“[L]ife forged in ongoing chemical violence is also life open to becoming something else, which is not a nostalgic return, but instead the defending of sovereignty starting here, within oneself and each other, here in the damage now. There is no waiting for a better condition.”
We talked about how, as sad as we are right now, we are alive. As many people as will die in the coming years – and more will die under Trump, from the climate crisis to escalating wars to deregulating food and drug safety to reducing access to vaccines – there will be life. We talked about the contradiction of the early months of the pandemic, especially for those of us with pets or small children: the way they kept on living, being adorable or challenging, having needs and insisting on care. There will be life.
Haverkamp’s article was one of the most vulnerable, humble pieces I had read in a long time. She describes the moment she realized the harm she caused by constantly asking her interlocutors, campesinos in the Peruvian Andes, their thoughts on the changing climate. They felt incredible grief when they saw the changes to their glacier-fed river, and how the water was now too acidic to support plant or animal life, too dangerous to drink. And she describes what she learns from one of her main interlocutors, Pablo Pachari, as he worked toward climate justice. To love is to care, to care is to act. Love, care, response.
We celebrate life where we have it, we work on our relationships because that is where we initiate material forms of activism: mutual aid, student support, abortion care, migrant safety. As a child, I never imagined so many dark days were ahead. I never imagined I might leave the world worse for my own children, rather than better. But we’re going to fight for as much as we can, through local organizing, through calling our politicians, and through getting to know our neighbors.
I re-read Naomi Kritzer’s The Year Without Sunshine every time I need a reminder.
* * *
Let’s talk about periods.
I’ve been thinking a lot about my place in this moment – I’m sure we all have. I’m a mother, a professor, an activist. I’ve got these kids to raise right. And I have something to say built up over decades of expertise when it comes to how we understand our bodies and how we approach the science in our lives.
When I wrote PERIOD, I wrote it as a feminist science book about the menstrual cycle. What I mean is, people keep trying to fit it into their understanding of what a book about periods should be: a self-help book to tell you how to fix them, or a cultural narrative to make you feel all woo woo about them. It’s a particular kind of sexism that has led us to expect little more than this: a guidebook to make us more palatable to others, or a reminder of how special it is to bleed so that we withstand pain and suffering. If there is anything to “fix” when it comes to our periods it's a completely different set of things: our understanding of what constitutes normal, our relationship to the environment, our recognition of how great it is that our bodies are a flexible system that responds to change rather than acts the same through this crisis and the next.
So, that’s not what I wrote. You can check out my Goodreads reviews to find the occasional person with exactly this frustration because this is what we are supposed to feed people when it comes to this topic. I was supposed to tell you what to eat and what exercises to do and what pollutants to avoid to have a nice, healthy, normal cycle. Or, I was supposed to toxic positivity you into submission about our connectedness to mother earth.
Instead, PERIOD teaches you about the eugenic histories of both gynecology and anthropology, about the mocking, degrading way we have written about and treated women scientists who had big ideas, about the cultural biases that have led to biased ideas about what periods are even for. Instead of a how-to or woo woo, I hoped to write about how one might think about periods, and from there, how one might think about science and one’s place in the world.
Justice is relational and local. When we develop insights into our bodies, our minds, our families, we can then extend those insights into greater understandings of the world and what we must do in it. The last chapter on menstrual justice and menstrual futures wasn’t just a chance for me to tell you about some of my favorite science fiction authors (though that was part of it). It was a chance to forge a connection between our bodies and our futures in a way that recognizes our responsibility. Love, care, response.
I’m going to keep working on relationships with people who hold the same values as me, even if we have different ideas about how to accomplish our goals. I’m going to tell the people that I love that I love them. I’m going to look at my podmap and think about how I can ensure I’m creating reciprocal and trusting spaces, not through control and being best-at, but through listening and making room.
Love, care, response.
Things to read
Science and Social Justice: an interview with Jenny Reardon – Jenny is a great colleague and someone who thinks well about values and ethics in science (I know the interviewer, Suze Kundu, as well – a determined and smart scientist and science communicator)
Aid Truck Looters in Gaza Operate Under Israeli Forces’ Protection, Reports Find (from truthout)
Texas Lawmakers Push for New Exceptions to State’s Strict Abortion Ban After the Deaths of Two Women (from ProPublica)
Many long COVID patients adjust to slim recovery odds as world moves on (from Reuters)
Who Goes Nazi? By Dorothy Thompson (Harper’s Magazine, 1941)