"My passion for menstrual health has always been rooted in a desire to challenge taboos and create space for open, informed dialogue. The response to Volume 1 and our first Cassyni seminar was incredibly affirming—witnessing the engagement, curiosity, and shared experiences reminded me why this work matters. That success has not only fuelled my drive but also made it clear: there’s so much more to explore. Volume 2 and a second seminar are natural next steps in continuing this vital conversation that comes at a critical moment when global systems that support women's and menstrual health are being systematically targeted and dismantled." - Marybec Griffin, Guest Editor of the Special Collection Improving Menstrual Health throughout the Reproductive Life Course This talk will provide an introduction to the speakers on the panel and their research about menstruation in a social context. By examining menstrual experiences across the gender spectrum, how we communicate about menstruation and gender, and finally a look at menstruation in film, we can see how pervasive othering of menstruation is within society. Menstrual Cycles and Hormones Across the Gender Spectrum Within biomedical research, menstruation has been historically understudied. Part of this is due to the misguided notion that the menstrual cycle and its underlying variation in hormones is too nosiy to account for in rodent experiments or large human studies. Estrogen and progesterone are two hormones underlying menstrual cycles and have been gendered as female despite males having similar levels of estrogen than females and both sexes have testosterone. Thus, the gendering of hormones has limited menstrual health research. In this presentation, I will show how measuring all steroids, regardless of how they are gendered, in transgender women, can shed new insights into our understanding of menstrual cycling and symptoms. Stigma, Shame and Stains: Menstruation in Anglo-American Cinema This presentation will discuss menstrual representation within Anglo-American fictional film, tracing its evolution from its near-total absence under Classical Hollywood’s censorship codes to its emergence as a symbol of transformation, monstrosity, and emotional excess drawing from my PhD research, Menstruation On Screen – A History of Stigma, Shame, and Stains from 2002 to 2022. Drawing upon theories of abjection, the monstrous feminine, affect theory and genre analysis, this presentation focuses on how menstruation is portrayed explicitly, symbolically, and peripherally across genres, and how these genres challenge and reinforce societal boundaries of gender and the body. The research draws connections to the broader intertextual feminist discourse on menstrual justice, particularly in how film and media can perpetuate or challenge menstrual stigma across diverse cultural contexts. This work contributes to a larger conversation on how emotional responses to menstruation, from disgust to defiance, shape public perceptions and impact policy discourse around reproductive health and menstrual equity. By examining these representations, the presentation highlights the need for more inclusive, compassionate portrayals that move beyond harmful stereotypes and embrace the complexities of menstruation, gender, and emotion. From ‘Old Wives Tales’ to Digital Trackers- The shifting social imaginaries of menstruation in Ireland. Menstruation, previously a hidden and “unspeakable” physiological process has quickly become an object of cultural, social and political contest. Until recently, coping with the menstrual cycle has been highly individualised, falling within the remit of medical advice, limited educational interventions or commercial interests including digital tracking technologies. To date, there have been no sociological studies of menstrual ‘management’ in Ireland that demonstrate how the process of menstruation is socially constructed, culturally framed, politically situated, and ultimately lived as a specific physiological experience that resonates across the life course. I advance a research agenda on menstrual ‘management’ that explains the nexus between knowledge, meaning, affect and emotional work across generations and in peer networks to discover the impact of forces that politicise, commercialise, and digitise menstruation. I argue that aspects of gendered progress are at risk especially where illiberalism and right-wing populism demand a retrogression in access to sexual education and reproductive rights (Vida 2019). The power of cross generational dynamics in shaping how women and girls frame their embodiment as well as their sexual and reproductive lives is a dynamic force that can tell us much about the ‘stickiness’ of gender cultural stereotypes, and indicates sources of resistance, creativity and change in how we ‘do gender’ in Irish society. Menstrual management is understood as operating on three levels: at the subjective micro level of individual management, the meso level of kinship and peer dynamics and at the macro level of cultural, institutional, and commercial framings including technological management. These levels interact to produce a particular social imaginary, a set of values, institutions, and symbols through which menstruation is experienced, regulated, commodified, digitized and contested. This paper will provide a contextualizing framework that maps shifts in medical advice, cultural representations around menstruation and actors/interests mobilizing on menstrual inequity and stigma. Menstruation is situated in the terrain of everyday experiences to assess it as a site of stigma but also of resistance. A sociological investigation of menstruation, perceived by many as a mundane, invisible, and shameful experience, offers a valuable insight into the realities of both gendered embodiment and gendered social change in Ireland.
A Tue, study studied this question.