My Body Bleeds. I Do Not Apologize. Color photograph from scan 60” x 60” 2021
Cleaned & Contained Audio 33 minutes 50 seconds 2023-ongoing
In 2018 I began working with my menses. This interesting genetic material indicates organic time, is a sign of being “not pregnant,” is a symbol of loss, and a social indication of a still youthful body. It’s also often aesthetically pleasing. Making work with this material naturally invites comments and conversations and confusions about menstruation and this organic corporal process. When I began creating with my blood, I worked with the Environmental Health and Safety Department at The Ohio State University to ensure public safety. I was taught that blood-borne pathogens need to be “cleaned and contained” to be made safe for the public. When I questioned why the blood in every woman's restroom was “safe” compared to that same blood anywhere else in the public world, they explained that in the bathroom trashcan it was considered “contained.” Adding bleach to blood is a way that it can be “cleaned.” This information pertains to blood from every part of the body of course, but the phrase stuck with me in the context of my experience as a human who inhabits a body capable of menstruation.
Cleaned and Contained seems to me to be an apt and concise way to summarize some of the ways I have felt having been born into this body. A body that menstruates is a body assumed capable of childbirth, and therefore, it is a body that holds a unique kind of power. I have absorbed, at varying levels throughout my lifetime, forces, institutions, and individuals who are motivated to control the body typically referred to as female. The body assumed capable of childbirth, as indicated by the menstrual cycle, is surrounded by mystery and myth due to a historic lack of medical research. Systemic inequities develop when myths are repeated as facts. When prejudice, based on myth informs policies and become laws, the human beings inhabiting these menstruating bodies lose the right to autonomically manage and care for their body. An excellent method of improving public health becomes distorted when the idea of “cleaning and containing” is mapped onto the menstruating body rather than remaining focused on blood, resulting in a loss of personhood.
Using the power of collaborative storytelling, this work expands, shifts, and interrupts historic and current narratives surrounding the menstruating body, reclaiming the power inherent to the person inhabiting the menstruating body and recognizing humanness. Please contact me to add your story!
This work was supported by a grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women.