Menstration Now What Does Blood Perform?: What Does Blood Perform?

By: Berkeley Kaite

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Synopsis: Each of the eight chapters in this volume addresses menstruation and/or menstrual blood in various media sites with a view to answering the question, what does blood perform? Menstrual blood may be enduringly feminine but it is never just one thing. Menstruation Now contains chapters on: the shifting “conversation” of menstruation in contemporary advertising; menstrual blood and the “female complaint” in Alice Munro’s short story, “Chance”; the signification of menstrual blood in legal discourse; blood as a para-text in pornographic films; the placement of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s phantasized menstrual blood in biographies of her; contemporary menstrual art; menstrual blood as liminal space in Ingmar Bergman’s film Cries and Whispers; and, unruly blood in the TV show Orange is the New Black. Blood is performative: disruptive, noisy, aesthetically fluid, difficult to discipline. It can thus, now as always, be performed again in the service of new meanings and experiences.