Menstrual Blood and the Blood of Christ: Streams of Strength, Vulnerability, and New Life

In this article I offer a new womanist perspective for looking at Christ's blood by interpreting its salvific effects in the context of menstruation. Like menstrual blood, Jesus' shedding of blood can serve as a reminder of our on-going potential for new life, our need for vulnerability, and the strength we gain through community and individual self-awareness and authenticity. Using menstruation as a hermeneutical lens maintains a central place for the crucifixion in Christianity without condoning violence or substitutionary sacrifice. It affirms women's bodies and reproductive processes by celebrating menstrual blood as empowering, transforming, and connected to the sacred. These affirmations serve as counternarratives to depictions of menstruation and other aspects of the female body as impure, as deeming women unfit to perform certain functions in the institutional church or society at-large, and as justifying treating women as inferior to men.