Disrupting Lunar Cycles: Selling Seasonal Menses

Authors

  • Christine Dol

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.15173/nexus.v19i1.201

Abstract

Women's embodied experience of menarche, menses, and menopause can reveal underlying misogynist biosocial assumptions embedded within medical and political policies and practices designed specifically for women based solely on our uniquely physiological embodied experiences. A new menstrual suppressing drug - Seasonale is the latest pharmaceutical insult/assault against women by the pharmaceutical industry capitalizing on the traditional Victorian misconceptions regarding the female body as being the diseased body in need of cultural control. This essay takes up Arthur Kleinman 's concept of 'explanatory models' to analyze the hidden issue of the gendered nature of biomedical discourse and the issue of medical knowledge production. The focus of this paper is on how biomedical discourses in the form of 'scientific' pharmaceutical rhetoric is actually constructing 'explanatory models' for women to practice and conform to a specific notion of the ideological woman in American society - the seasonal bleeder. I argue that well into the 21st century, the female body embodied in natural reproductive functions is produced discursively as an idiom of pathology ill the 'explanatory models' produced by Western biomedical discourse.

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Published

2006-01-01

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Section

Articles