Period Goes #2
Hello and welcome to installment 2 of my lazy newsletter!
I really regret that it wasn't until after I wrote this newsletter that I recognized the possibility of framing the whole thing around a poop joke.
One small book update
You may have noticed my Twitter banner has changed and includes one of my endorsements. If you’d like to read the other blurbs and nice things people have said about my book so far, you can check them out on my press’s website. Just click on the word “Praise.” Squee!
A few interesting links
It took them long enough, but I’m glad to see a number of feminist organizations finally speak out on behalf of Amber Heard, and others who face retaliatory defamation lawsuits by perpetrators.
Are you someone who gets asked to do the kind of labor at work that is crucial for moving things along but does not directly support your career advancement? Congratulations, you’re probably a woman! This study discusses what the authors call “non-promotable tasks,” and how typically women are asked to volunteer for this work… and even if a woman says no, the person who ends up getting asked next is also a woman.
My colleague Dr. Faye Harrison sent this one to me – a biology professor who spent a lecture on the social construction of gender is facing a backlash not only from the parent of one of her students, but her own administration. Her dean told her to “change her approach or be removed from the class,” affording to the story. Here’s the problem, though… GENDER IS SOCIALLY CONSTRUCTED. And I’ve got news for you about sex, too… the idea we have that there are just two sexes is not only constructed from Western ideas of sex but does not actually match the biology. There are so many great papers on this topic, and more than one way to think about it, but for now I’ll just share Dr. Daphna Joel’s paper on “3G sex:” that sex categories themselves are gonadal, genital, and genetic. I was tempted to share one of her more recent papers but I like how this one does a nice job exploding the idea that everyone is in the same sex categories for all things we tend to binarize into “male” and “female.”
Finally, another word on the Indian Child Welfare Act. This newsletter at its core is about reproductive justice, and ICWA is about removing Indigenous children from their families and cultures. So ICWA is about reproductive justice and we need to keep talking about it and paying attention. I want to point to Rebecca Nagle’s thread of Indigenous coverage of ICWA, as well as her interview on WNYC on the topic.
A weird period fact
Have you heard of Toxic Shock Syndrome? If you use tampons and haven't died yet of it, make sure to thank feminist health activists Esther Rome, Nancy Reame, and others. Tampon manufacturers used to use blue saline (yes blue, just like the commercials!) to test the absorbency of their products – a fluid that acts nothing like menstrual blood. Rome and Reame performed tests with heparinized blood (blood treated to slow coagulation) and ended up setting this as a new testing standard. You can also thank them for there now being Regular, Super, and Super-Plus tampons that have official absorbency ranges. Using the correct type of fluid and establishing norms in absorbencies, alongside what we now know about the aerobic environment that can be produced in the vagina when using certain synthetics in tampons, are the main elements that have made TSS, for all intents and purposes, history.
Source: Vostral, S. (2017). "Toxic Shock Syndrome, Tampon Absorbency, and Feminist Science." Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 3(1).