Menstruation — the Gap in the Text?

Recent advances in neuroscience provide compelling evidence of the significance of our embodiment for our psychic life, and the extent to which subjectivity is both a social and a psychological phenomenon. In thinking about the experiential sense of living in an explicitly female body, I suggest that the connotations of disgust with which menstruation is associated cannot fail to affect women's core sense of identity and subjectivity. As gendered blood, to no small degree separating and defining women, the way that it is consciously and unconsciously represented contributes to the way that difference is experienced by every female. We cannot fail, in part, to become what we are attributed to be.

In this paper I have tried to think about the ways in which psychoanalysis appears to mirror a cultural avoidance, which in part it helps to promote, whereby menstruation represents the concealed nature of female sexuality, in contrast to which the phallus continually signifies itself. When acknowledged at all, menstruation is seen as a loss, an incontinence, or an absence (of babies) — a symbol of waste and a break in productivity. I have considered ways in which, and reasons why, images of blood and women can be seen as a sign pointing to a reality against which other variables are measured. Within this paradigm I have attempted to consider ways in which menstruation can be considered to be a metaphor for women's symbolic and real absence, marginalization, fragile status, inarticulacy and misrepresentation.