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Bloody Women Artists

Ruth Green-Cole

While there are isolated cases of reverence for menstruation, in general, many societies impose a
strict set of rules about the visualisation of menstrual blood in art and visual culture. The
hegemonic and patriarchal codes controlling the discussion and visualisation of menstruation have
been formed over long periods of time by various traditional communities, Orthodox religious
authorities and the patriarchal medical gaze. Ultimately, these views have been internalised by
millions of women worldwide as both negative and shameful. Over time, menstruation has
developed a fraught and complicated semiotic,1 one further influenced by the role of the vagina as
a sex organ; concerning reproduction, and the censorship involved in exposing body parts. This
raises the question, if menstruation happened in another part of the body, one that is not
associated with intercourse, would it have the same stigma? In the same way, the continuous
concealment of the reproductive body from society (the practice of menstrual etiquette, a
homebound pregnant women and the sexualised breast) has created the false assumption that a
leaky body is unnatural, and that when it is concealed, the body is acting normally.2

Luce Irigaray has observed [f]luids are implicitly associated with femininity, maternity,
menstruation and the body. Fluids are subordinated to that which is concrete and
solid.3 Therefore, the body is something that should be controlled to enable a prescribed
representation of self-identity. In particular, menstruation has been codified as an uncontrollable
bodily function that needs to be organised, managed and contained. Hence the cyclic continuation
of performative acts to create the appearance of a natural state. Judith Butler explains, gender is
not a fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of gender and without those acts there would
be no gender at all. Gender is thus, a construction that regularly conceals its genesis.4 To
understand menstruation as gendered blood is to recognise the ritualisation of difference through
cleansing practices, psychoanalytic classifying and other constructs that affect the position of
women.

During the early sixties, some years before the growth of an organised feminist movement in the
visual arts, Fluxus artists Shigeko Kubota and Carolee Schneemann positioned their bodies in,
and as, their art. They employed the modernist language of abstract expressionism, but in
contrast to its patriarchal expectations. These artists were interested in debunking or
overthrowing modernism because of its supposedly reactionary desire to ensure artist
presence5 and its dismissal of body art projects. The female artists body became a gesturing,
expressive body, a mode of projecting non-conformity, suffering, activism and excess as a way of
laying claim to being itself.6 As Kubota said in her Video Poem(1968-76), I, a woman, feel, I
Bleed, therefore I am.7

Kubotas Vagina Painting (1965), Schneemanns Interior Scroll (1975) and Ana Mendietas Body
Tracks (1974) (as well as subsequent homages by Schneemann and Nancy Spero to the
aforementioned Body Tracks) show a spatial and metaphorical use of paint as gendered blood
through female expression. In a subjugation of Abstract Expressionism, artists like Kubota used
an intermingling of painting and performance to demonstrate that women have a voice within art
making and to demarcate a space for women as a (re)action against the dominant ideologies
surrounding painting. Artworks such as Kubotas Vagina Painting and Schneemanns Meat
Joy (1964) destabilised the conventions of art history and criticism, paving the way for widespread
feminist art making.

Judy Chicagos depictions of menstruation, Red Flag (1971) and Menstruation Bathroom (19712), have became some of the most documented art works visualising menstruation in popular
culture, alongside Schneemanns Interior Scroll the canonical performance of vulvic space
which has now become the ultimate anti-classical sealed body presentation.8There were
however, other important blood prints from the seventies; Schneemanns BLOODWORK
DIARY (1972) and Judy Clarks Menstruation (1973), as well as occasions of menstrual
performance; Catherine Elwes Menstruation I andMenstruation II (1979), which were
performances of horizontal, blood inscriptions created through processes of bleeding, drawing and
writing.9 Through performance, bloodletting or painterly gestures incorporating a trace of the body,
we also have Marina Abramovi, Gina Pane, Ana Mendieta, and later Orlan. These artists all
inscribed their blood as gendered, ultimately demarcating a space for contemporary visualisations
of menstruation. In the seventies it was important to draw attention to (and be proud of) issues and
topics, such as menstruation, that had been swept under the rug. Looking forward, has anything
changed substantially? Do artists dealing with menstruation within contemporary art have
something new to say, or are they still struggling to get patriarchal societies to own up to their
prejudices surrounding menstruation? What contribution will visualising menstruation have to
social change?

Artworks that deal with menstruation in many different ways are important because they work
against negative stereotypes and actively re-value gendered blood;10 showing it in a positive,
defiant or ambiguous light. Contemporary three-dimensional works by Tracey Emin, Amy Jenkins,
Joana Vasconcelos, Shilpa Gupta and Allyson Mitchell unpack and challenge dominant behavior
and the expectations made of women concerning the visibility of menstruation. Contemporary art
works made by these artists utilise menstruation to express ideas of gendered space, taboo,
abjection, lived experience and social-cultural inequality. To discuss these works Foucaults notion
of heterotopias becomes a useful and productive framework.11 Most importantly, his account of
heterotopia places menstruation into a kind of neutral, liminal space; a transitory space in which
women are situated through cyclic reproductive states of being.

Foucault defines his concept of heterotopias as, [a] sort of simultaneously mythic and real
contestation of the space in which we live.12 Therefore, heterotopias, in contrast to fictional
utopias, are actual spaces, which exist outside of or within the society that produced them, such

as isolated or restricted areas, jails or hospitals. Cemeteries and ships, carnivals and circuses are
ambivalent spaces whilst also being spaces of otherness and difference, where abjected and
rejected bodies are made to reside. These physical heterotopias are spaces that create room for
displaced bodies to act. Understood in this way, heterotopias are evolving spaces of positive
transgression that can transform into constructive spaces, so that marginalised people can act
inside them in order to rupture or recode these spaces.

Spatial heterotopias are immersive spaces that position the viewer inside of them, through
phenomenological considerations of the body in relation to space. For example, gendered
heterotopias are commonly associated with domestic spaces and places; the den, man-cave, and
workshop, can be considered gendered heterotopias. This is because they are real spaces that
exist in reality; however, they are places specifically reserved for the male gender. Although
anachronistic, female gendered spaces were traditionally the home, in particular rooms such as
the kitchen, the laundry and the bathroom. Many artworks (which I will come back to) are spatial
and have transgressed against or have productively worked through heterotopias.

Whilst previous mentions of heterotopic space are located in the physical realm, there is another
heterotopic framework that Foucault considers a deviation from material heterotopias due to their
cyclic liminality. These spaces are different from other material or physical spaces in that they
occur in relation to reproduction: specifically, menstruation, pregnancy and lactation. Foucault
elaborates:

[t]here is a certain form of heterotopia that I would call crisis heterotopias, i.e., there are privileged
or sacred or forbidden places, reserved for individuals who are, in relation to society and to the
human environment in which they live, in a state of crisis; adolescents, menstruating women,
pregnant women, the elderly, etc.13

Crisis heterotopias differ from public spaces insofar as female bodily spaces are corporeal and
cerebral spaces that have historically devised womens social function. This culturally constructed
set of rules determines normative behaviour or that which is made to appear normal.14 Signs of
menstrual blood in public are considered deviant, as menstruation is something that women are
taught to conceal from an early age. Even though menstruation is a natural phenomenon, many

women associate menstruation with inconvenience and embarrassing leaky moments, only
looking forward to their periods arrival when they are concerned about pregnancy, or quietly
mourn its cessation at the onset of menopause. Tracey Emin refers to the end of menstruation as
the moment when her womb will become a dry redundant bag. In response to these sedimented
ideas, Emins installation History of Painting Part 1 (1999) which consists of morning after pills,
pregnancy tests, a piece of writing about what it means to menstruate, five blood soaked tampons
and tissue displayed in vitrines actually situates bloodied tampons in a public space, a
deviation from normative behaviour and a defiling of reified public spaces. In doing this, History of
Painting Part 1 transforms what have previously been understood as the transcendent masculine
spaces of the art gallery and art history itself to create an equivocal and polysemous
heterotopia for art. Foucaults concept of heterotopia is useful as a way to avoid the dualities of
public and private, clean and unclean places, real and imaginary spaces where gender
essentialism can result, especially when women are associated more with the second term
mentioned in these dualities. Not only are biological processes restricted, contained or
quarantined to marginal places associated with unclean and negative values, these places have
then become womens places. Foucaults heterotopia destabilises such strictly defined spaces by
suggesting that a fluidity between spaces and categories is possible.

American artist Amy Jenkins uses sculpture and video installation to displace notions of space
and object. In her video projection work Ebb (1996) a miniature three-dimensional bathtub takes
centre stage in a darkened room.15 The video loop begins with a fount of bloody water, which is
projected from above onto the bathtubs porcelain surface. Jenkins creates a four-minute loop
where a woman (the artist) climbs into the tub and the blood flow acts like a receding tide into her
body, in effect reversing the menstrual flow. Ebb refers to receding menstruation, a soaking up of
life force and an internal receiving.16 The soundtrack that accompanies the video projection
creates an atmosphere of privacy in an imaginary or pre-constructed bathroom. We hear the
water echo as it splashes against the side of the tub, a faint tap drips and the breathing and
sighing of the woman is accompanied by the underlying regularity of her heartbeat. It is a process
of purification in reverse. Jenkins, fortified by her transfusion, submerges herself before stepping
out of the bath and disappearing, leaving the viewer temporarily alone in the dark void of the
gallery space. Visiting Ebb in the gallery, one experiences the phenomenological aspects of the
work; from the darkened room, to peering down into a the world of a miniature tub, gazing at a

naked menstruating woman in a moving projection, listening to a fluidic soundtrack, all of which
evoke a sense of trespassing. Ebb has interesting parallels with Mona Hatoums Corps
tranger (1994) and Deep Throat (1996), in which the internal is made visible with endoscopic
footage of the body, showing a larger concern of deconstructing emotional reactions such as
desire and revulsion. Artists such as Jenkins create gendered spaces in galleries to make visible
marginalised lived experiences, and to spatially and phenomenologically challenge the viewer.

Amy Jenkins, Ebb, projection still, 1996.

Ebb, the presentation of menstruation and a bathtub in a gallery, traces its linage
from Womanhouse (1971), initiated by Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro with a group of students
from CalArts Feminist art program. This project aimed to to make visible the segregation of social
space in society. Within this larger installation in an abandoned mansion in a residential street in
Hollywood, Chicago was responsible for creating Menstruation Bathroom, a room installed with an
abundant variety of sealed, unsealed and used sanitary products. The rubbish bin inside this room
was full of pads and tampons that threatened to overflow onto the floor in an excessive manner.
The immersive artwork was designed to challenge both mens and womens assumptions about

the female body. As menstruation is typically experienced in a bathroom, the very act of
menstruation in bathrooms engenders the space itself. The bathroom then becomes a heterotopic
site where abjected and rejected female bodies are confined to deal with dirty processes.
Society enforces a menstrual etiquette centred around two main rules: concealment and
cleanliness. Chicagos Menstruation Bathroomdeviates from these two major rules. As Carol
Ockman recollected after visiting Menstruation Bathroom at the Womanhouse project: I was
shocked and I loved it the irony in this piece pristine and messy the fact the female body
cant be contained.17 The central focus of this installation was the overflowing and perioded18 rubbish bin of used sanitary products. Lauren Rosewarne, author of Periods in Pop Culture,
reported that this work was likely to be the first time that used menstrual products left the private
sphere of the bathroom to be seen in the public space of the art world.19Menstruation
Bathroom openly portrays what it means to enter the personal and heterotopic space of a
gendered bathroom.

In a similar way, Emins seminal work My Bed (1999) emulates her personal space into a
sequestered construct, the art gallery. Positioning her private space in a public domain, Emin
challenges societys understanding of what it means to have a normal female body and societys
construction of humiliation towards womans bassesse (base materialism), a term used by
Georges Bataille.20 In amongst the debris that littered Emins My Bed installation was blood
stained sheets, underwear and condoms, which implied that menstrual sex had occurred. The
work was not specifically about menstrual sex; it was about a lived-in bedroom in a broader sense,
one where intra-menstrual intercourse may have taken place. Intercourse during menstruation is
one of societies severest taboos as Julia Kristeva asserts, [t]aboo is the concept that belongs to
societies or social practices that make a strong distinction between sacred and profane. The
notion of a taboo generates rules against crossing borders,21 namely spatial segregation and
isolation of periods during menstruation.

There is also another transition, more specifically within the heterotopia of adolescence, between
child and adult. For the female adolescent, in her transition to womanhood, the heterotopia
evolves as a double bind. Menarche occurs during adolescence and continues from then on until
menopause. The transition to womanhood ceases at the onset of menarche, which in early
modern England marked a transition of status, making a young woman marriageable. After

menarche, the bleeding that was occasioned by beginning a sexual relationship formally marked a
social transition from maid to wife, a change which was often recorded by woman themselves as a
change in their condition, meaning both physically and socially. This was normally followed by a
post-partum flow that marked the transition into motherhood.22 Sara Read discusses these as
occasions of transitional bleeding that mark a females changing status in society.
Reads account of early modern English womens marriageability after menarche and position as
wife upon defloration is still significant in many traditional communities and societies. It is
important for women in these communities to marry early for fear for becoming a burden on their
family. Elaborate ceremonies take place, which are also statements of family wealth and status.
Joana Vasconcelos 600x350x350cm chandelier installation A Noiva (The Bride) (2001-2005)
takes the chandelier a large statement of glamour and sophistication and signifies the
feminine with its delicate construction. Vasconcelos chandelier engages the viewer with its
gargantuan scale and draws them in to reveal that its detailed construction is comprised of twentyfive thousand tampons. Using tampons en masse again changes the way menstrual products
have been contextualised in art practices. In contrast to Chicagos Menstruation Bathroom, which
includes the semiotics of blood, Vasconcelos constructs her chandelier out of an object from
material culture that is associated with the abject. The repetition of tampons conceptualises
notions of consumerism and control of womens bodies.

Joana Vasconcelos, A Noiva [The Bride], tampons, 6000x3500x3500mm, 2001-2005.

Through repetition Vasconcelos achieves abstraction of these ideas to create an implicit message,
stating that, I somehow manage to translate lo-cult into hi-cult. By combining something banal,
something quotidian and worthless with the concept of modern sculpture.23 The tampon is a
mass-produced product, but it does not exsist in the homes of women in many countries. The
artist acknowledges in an interview that, although menstruation is universal, is not thought of the
same way in every country.24 For example, a man Vasconcelos met in Istanbul made it clear to
her that the tampon has an additional meaning: In this mans culture, the tampon is frowned
upon, seen as something that causes infection and destroys a womans virginity.25 Vasconcelos
considers the tampon a banal object, however in Istanbul tampons are concealed from view, not
talked about, and have to be purchased at the chemist inconspicuously for fear of
embarrassment. In his book Symbols and Action, Ian Hodder discusses how material culture can
act as a measure of an ideology of power, whereby the supremacy of older men is justified and
supported. Individual artifact types may be used to emphasise or deny, to maintain or disrupt,
ethnic distinctions or networks of information flow.26 In this case, the difficulty in purchasing
menstrual products is indicative of disingenuous information control.

The constructed chandelier also represents the union of a man and a virgin bride, a highly
desirable social position. Vasconcelos has ironically emphasised this through the associations of
unused tampons as clean and therefore supposedly virginal. The link between menstruation and
femininity is further emphasised by the location in which A Noiva has been exhibited. The various
large salons and gallerias that have hosted this work serve to further de-construct and re-construct
notions of class, beauty and femininity. On the artists website, a documentary video layers slow
moving cinematography accompanied by The Blue Danube waltz by Johann Stauss II.27 The
phenomenological experience of being with this work, accompanied by refined music in a space of
reverence, enhances a paradoxical message of cleanliness and uncleanliness, virgin bride and
promiscuous women.

Vasconcelos A Noiva may serve to glamorise menstruation by using the tampon a synecdoche
for menstruation, referring to blood without actually depicting blood. Viewing menstruation as a
dirty and unclean process has had extreme benefits for a capitalist consumerist culture.
Multinational corporations that endorse the use of sanitary products to make financial gains
simultaneously make use of and underpin negative messages about menstruation. Generic

advertisements for washing powder, amongst other sanitary related advertisements, employ
slogans about the products ability to remove bloodstains. These are dominant messages within
advertising and consumer culture imply that women need help to liberate them from their
enslavement to their bodily processes28 and that they should contain and control any
embarrassing leaky incidents.

Joana Vasconcelos, A Noiva [The Bride], tampons, 6000x3500x3500mm, 2001-2005.

Instead of encouraging women to sanitise or hide the process of menstruation, Indian artist Shilpa
Gupta requested that her family and friends get more involved with their flow of menstrual blood.
In her 2001 Untitled (Period) installation on menstruation, she gave packages to her family in
Mumbai and colleagues in France, containing cloths, a pair of scissors and a plastic
sachet.29 She requested that participants stain the cloths with their menstrual blood. After the
cloths dried, she asked the contributors to cut along the edges of the stains, place them in the
plastic sachet, and return them to the artist. Gupta exhibited the menstrual cloths, attaching them
across a wall and table randomly to form a right angle. The menstrual fabric installation was
accompanied by the projects instructions in a vitrine, and two videos; the first displayed images of
three white pajama pants hanging in the Indian sun, and the second showed footage of a hand
carefully stitching menstrual stained cloths onto said white pajamas. The cutting and stitching
catharsis and the seemingly unhygienic nature of the work disappear as it becomes impossible to
distinguish whose blood is whose. The artist talks about the idea that the cutting of the stains by
each participant became meditative, allowing the women the change her relationship to the object
and her treatment of her own menstrual blood.

Gupta explained she was seeking to provoke a transgression for those who choose to become
proactive and engage with the work.30 In using the term engagement Gupta is referring to more
than just visiting the gallery, she references the active participants who helped develop the formal
elements of the installation during which the boundary between the public and the artist
disappeared. The process is fluid and interactive, as the viewer becomes at once active
participant and voyeur. On another level, the sense of individualism disappears as different blood
comes together and mixes, trespassing on patriarchal notions of contamination and the sharing of
bodily fluids.

Women in India are refused access to some religious temples and monuments if they are
menstruating (depending on which Hindu or other religious traditions they follow). Gupta recalls a
common practice where she was refused entry to a place of worship as a schoolgirl and
consequently had to wait outside. Historically menstruating women were also banned from the
kitchen, but as Gupta puts it, she confronted these issues directly as she wondered how such
mechanisms are used to perpetuate categorisations, which in turn justify a certain
behavior.31 Her menstrual installation is aimed at making people question the myths and

discrimination around menstruating women, but also to challenge womens own internal
sedimentation about the way they think, feel and act about menstrual blood. Menstrual regulations
in India are still prevalent, and exist largely around the societal taboos that make menstruation
unspeakable, not to mention invisible, even amongst women.

Historically and in some cultural traditions, during menstruation women were either divided by
menstrual huts, or were allowed to move about freely but must conceal their blood. In modern
society we mostly conform to the latter. As a remnant of a taboo status these [d]ominant norms in
advanced industrial societies affirm that women should have the same opportunities to do
anything that men do, but at the same time force women to conceal their
menstruation.32Conforming and hiding are what Young refers to as living in the menstrual
closet. Certain rules must be obeyed to protect society from the abject and leaky body. Young
states [w]omen as menstruators live through a split-subjectivity insofar as we claim the public
face of normalcy and a fear of exposure of the private fluidity of our flesh.33 This requires an act
of concealment, as the default body is assumed to be a body that does not bleed unless it is
injured. Young speaks about the paradox of enacting normalcy in the face of being deviant. The
menstruating woman in society is forced to be dishonest, to act normal and pretend she is not
menstruating. As Young goes onto suggest, we can liken a menstruating woman to hiding in the
closet. It seems apt, then, in this normatively masculine, supposedly gender-egalitarian society, to
say that the menstruating woman is queer.34 Looking at menstruating women with a queer
perspective highlights the multiplicity of ways in which people are made to feel ashamed or who
are positioned as strange as a consequence of their being or actions. The problem lies with the
idea of normal.35

Menstrual huts and separation and seclusion rituals are, as Foucault suggests, crisis heterotopias;
however, they are also gendered heterotopias that feminist artists have reclaimed to be creative
spaces for making visible womens marginalised bodies. Assistant Professor of Women Studies at
York University Allyson Mitchell is a maximalist36 practitioner working in the fields of sculpture,
installation, film and performance. Her practice focuses on feminism and pop culture, examining
ideas about sexuality, queer theory and the body. Mitchell does this predominantly through
reclaiming fibre and textile craft as materials that have been traditionally associated with female
domestic labour. The craft tradition recalls the domestic labour of American and European women

over the last two hundred years.37 Mitchells practice involves creating spaces for the
marginalised, such as her 150 square feet Menstrual Hut Sweet Menstrual Hut (2010).38 This
ostentatious textile-lined installation was created as a space for viewers to retreat to watch
Mitchells films Afghanimation (2008) andMy Life in Five Minutes (2000). The leisure activity of
watching television, combined with the historical association of the menstrual hut, makes this
installation a space of otherness; a heterotopic space inside a gallery.

Simultaneously a place of banishment and cozy refuge, Mitchells menstrual hut is a space for the
displaced to be seen in public. Her menstrual theatre screened films that investigate the way the
female body has been treated by the self and patriarchal powers. My Life in Five Minutes is an
autobiographical memoir concerning the body. Mitchell refers humorously and self-demoralisingly
to the social pressures to conform to normative behaviour and standards of
heterosexuality.Afghanimation is a film that critiques Canadas involvement with Afghanistan and
illustrates how the female body has been politicised. It does this by concentrating on a hand
woven rug depicting an image of an Afghani women surrounded by tanks and
grenades. Menstrual Hut Sweet Menstrual Hut was exhibited as part of a group exhibition of video
and experimental film called FIERCE: Womens Hot-Blooded Film/Video at the McMaster
Museum of Art, McMaster University, Canada. The group show featured Mitchell and three other
female artists, Maureen Bradley, Dana Claxton, and b. h. Yael, who are considered to be at the
forefront of Canadian-based media production and video installation. Interestingly, Mitchells
menstrual hut creates a space for menstruation without using the semiotic of blood. Whilst the
exhibition title might imply womens blood, it was only present in references to each artist as hotblooded and feisty, and thematically acknowledged by Mitchells work, Menstrual Hut Sweet
Menstrual Hut. It could be argued, then, that this work shows an element of self-censorship by
withdrawing the visualisation of menstrual blood from the work.

Spatial art practices such as Chicago, Emin and Mitchells actively transform personalised and
marginalised bodily functions, making them centre stage in order to spatialise and sustaining the
affective and immersive aspects of menstruation. Furthermore, the sequestered space is no
longer the space it was before. If an object is put in the wrong place, two things occur; the
element displaced is matter out of place and the place left behind is altered.39 Consequently, a
new space is created, a space that allows marginalisation to be made visible. Chicago, Emin and

Mitchell have created a new visual discourse about menstruation, which critiques the way modern
industrial societies manage menstrual taboos.

In a different way, Vasconcelos A Noiva underlines the management or control of menstruation,

which has become domesticated and misinterpreted by different cultures. She uses the pop art
methodologies of elevating the banal into sequestered spaces; as well as appropriating or
subverting the everyday object and its realities, particularly those that concern the position of
women in terms of class distinction and cultural identity. The subversion is also phenomenological
as Vasconcelos work is temporal as well as spatial. For example, viewers must walk through the
affective space of the installation in all of these works; a woman must be conscious of self while
taking the time to do so. Importantly, the matter out of place becomes the male visiting this
installation space. This undermines gender essentialism assigned to spatial coordinates, as the
male visitor breaks the taboo by entering a space that has historically stigmatised women, the
stigma is transferred onto him. The man is made to feel disorientated or queer in Youngs terms
which in turn creates a queering of the space, as the males presence changes its function as a
strictly segregated menstruation space. Traditionally, men are not used to art addressing them in
this manner. In works such as Chicagos Menstruation Bathroom, Emins My Bed, and
Vasconcelos A Noiva, men literally transverse a divide. As they walk into the space of stigma and
taboo associated with menstruation, they are forced to renegotiate their own socially constructed
gender.

It is important to keep in mind that there is not one right or correct way to understand what
menstruation, menstrual blood and taboo mean. Nevertheless, it is important that artists should be
allowed to analyse and expose how traditional structures of power can make people feel
vulnerable and ashamed. In diverse and personal ways, the artists I have discussed share this
common aim. Some artists, such as Emin, are content to use their art to critique how menstrual
blood is made into gendered blood and associated with the stereotype of women as the weaker
and inferior sex. This biological determinism remains unchallenged if assigned to the margins of
the non-visible. Thus, their art functions as a social critique of gender essentialism merged with
biological essentialism. Some artists go further and celebrate menstruation in their art as a way to
turn stigma and shame into transgressive and creative acts. This causes some conflict, the kind
characterised by the different traditions of feminism indebted to Judith Butler and Luce Irigaray.

While Butler vehemently opposed gender essentialism and saw gender as a social and cultural
construct that assigns negative traits to women, Irigaray was content to accept some of these
traits the female imaginary and celebrate them as a way of creating that exsisted away from
transgressing against patriarchy. It could be argued that this tension continues to exist in the
multiplicity of approaches to menstruation in art. Still, it is important that, whatever approach one
favors, such discursivity be aired in public, made visible and divested of any historical or habitual
residues of shame or deference that favors models of decorum and femininity.

About the author

Ruth Green-Cole is the Director and Curator of the Whangarei Art Museum. She holds three
qualifications from the University of Auckland; a Master of Arts with First Class honours in Art
History, A Post-Graduate Diploma with Distinction in Art History and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from
Elam School of Fine Arts. Her research interests include contemporary art, New Zealand art,
printmaking, artist books, the leaky body, menstruation, gender, queer theory, and feminist art
practices. To read more about menstruation and art please visit Ruths blog hyperheterotopia.com

1.

Ros Bramwell asserts that this confused semiotic is an important element in the embarrassment that surrounds
menstruation. Ros Bramwell, Blood and Milk: Constructions of Female Bodily Fluids in Western
Society, Women and Health 34, no. 4 (2001), 90.
2. The concept of the leaky body was first discussed by in an essay by Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not
One, (Cornell University, 1985).
3. Irigaray, This Sex, 113.
4. Judith Butler, Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist
Theory, Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (1988): 522.
5. Amelia Jones and Tracey Warr, The Artists Body (London; New York, NY: Phaidon, 2012), 21.
6. Ibid.
7. A single line from the second verse of Shigeko Kubotas, Video Poem, (1968-76), In Ira Schneider and Berel
Korot, eds., Video Art: An Anthology (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976); reprinted in Mary Jane
Jacob, ed., Shigeko Kubota: Video Sculpture (New York: American Museum of the Moving Image, 1991),
18.
8. See More than Meat Joy: Complete Performance Works and Selected Writings (Kingston, New York:
Documentext, 1997 (1979), 234-239. She performed the work in 1975 at Women Here and Now and in 1977
at the Telluride Film Festival.
9. Kathy Battista, Renegotiating the Body: Feminist Art in 1970s London (London; New York: I.B Tauris and Co
Ltd, 2013), 80.
10. The term gendered blood comes from Mary Jane Luptons, Menstruation and Psychoanalysis, (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1993), 3.
11. Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces, in Other Spaces: The Affair of the Heterotopia: Die Affre Der
Heterotopie, edited by Bernd Knaller-Vlay and Roland Ritter (Graz, Austria: Haus der Architektur 1998), 28.
The term heterotopia was first used by Foucault in the preface for The Order of Things (1966). A few months
afterwards, he employed the word again in a radio broadcast of two lectures called France Culture. In 1967,

12.
13.
14.
15.
16.

17.
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Foucault completed a text called Of Other Spaces, which transcribes this radio lecture, adding more principles
afterward to describe and define heterotopia.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ebb, 1996, Amy Jenkins, accessed July 2, 2012, http://www.amyjenkins.net/video%20pages/ebb.html.
Ebb has a companion work Flow (2005), a nine-minute time-lapse over nine months of pregnancy, (one minute
per month). Flow is an allegory for the act of creating, or bringing forth form the self. Flow, 2005, Amy
Jenkins, accessed July 2, 2012, http://www.amyjenkins.net/video pages/flow.html.
Gail Levin, Becoming Judy Chicago: A Biography of the Artist. 1st ed. (New York: Harmony Books, 2007),
199.
Lauren Rosewarne, Periods in Pop Culture: Menstruation in Film and Television (Lanham, Md: Lexington
Books, 2012), 10. It is worth mentioning that period-ed is not done but experienced.
Ibid, 11. Interestingly, Rosewarne refers to galleries; however, this work was first put together in an
abandoned house, and then later exhibited in New York, 1965, and later in Los Angeles. My research also
indicates that this is not the first work to include sanitary products. It is possible that Faith Wildings
installation Sacrifice (1971), a room-size installation at the Feminist Art Program studio in Fresno, CA was the
first work as it included cows blood and also Kotex, a sanitary product. Womanhouse was created after the
program moved to the California Institute for the Arts in the fall of 1971.
Tracey Emin, The Saatchi Gallery, accessed October 11,
2010, http://www.saatchigallery.com/artists/artpages/tracey_emin_my_bed.htm. The installation includes her
bed, in all its embarrassing glory. Empty booze bottles, fag butts, stained sheets, worn panties: the bloody
aftermath of a nervous breakdown.
Iris Marion Young, Menstrual Mediations, in On Female Body Experience: Throwing Like a Girl and other
Essays, (Bloomington New York: Oxford University Press), 2005, 111.
Sara Read, Menstruation and the Female Body in Early Modern England (Palgrave McMillian, 2013), 2.
Agustn Prez Rubio, From Micro to Macro and Viceversa: A Conversation between Agustn Prez Rubio and
Joana Vasconcelos, in Joana Vasconcelos, (Lisbon: ADIAC Portugal, Corda Seca, 2007), 164.
It is worth mentioning that in the 1960s, Menstrual product manufacturer Kimberly Clarke moved to the
position that tampons were smaller than the opening of the hymen, therefore they were perfectly fine for virgins
to use. Lara Freidenfelds, The Modern Period: Menstruation in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2009), 175. Some women enthusiastically adopted the tampon as a menstrual
management product, while others rejected them as dangerous, too difficult or ineffective. Freidenfelds
comments, Many women who chose not to use tampons displayed a keen awareness of the class and ethnic
differences their other, shared, menstrual practices had served to obscure. Ibid., 8. The tampon was treated
as a potentially harmful menstrual product considering it was used to tamp or plug the blood flow.
Obstructing blood with a tampon blood led people to believe them as harmful products.
Rubio, From Micro to Macro, 163.
Ian Hodder, Symbols in Action: Ethnoarchaeological Studies of Material Culture (Cambridge Cambridgeshire;
New York: Cambridge University Press 1982), 85.
A Noiva The Bride, (2001), Joana Vasconcelos, Artist Website, Installation video, accessed October 2,
2015,http://joanavasconcelos.com/video_en.aspx?oid=616.
Ibid, 94.
Shilpa Gupta, Untitled (Period), 2001, Process based work: instruction manual in vitrine, Cloth stained with
menstrual blood and 2 videos and monitors, Artist Collection.
Ann Huber-Sigwart, Bridging the Gap: The work of Shilpa Gupta, n.paradoxia, Vol. 21, 17, accessed
February 06, 2012,http://shilpagupta.com/about/bibio/2008/ann.html.
Ibid.
Iris Marion Young, 104.
Ibid, 109.
Ibid, 107.
Ibid, 108.
Maximalism is a reaction against reductivist minimalism of the 1960s. Maximalist artists value labour intensive
techniques and processes to create complex, layered and richly detail art works.
Emmanuel Cooper, The Sexual Perspective: Homosexuality and Art In the Last 100 Years in the West 2nd ed.
(London; New York: Routledge 1994), 318.
Micro-Maxi-Pad Cinema, 2010 - Allyson Mitchell, Allyson Mitchell, accessed September 27, 2013,
www.allysonmitchell.com,http://www.allysonmitchell.com/visual%20art%20html/micro_maxi_pad.html.
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger an Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge,
1984).http://public.eblib.com/EBLPublic/PublicView.do?ptiID=165644, 41.