Medicalising menstruation: a feminist critique of the political economy of menstrual hygiene management in South Asia
Medicalising menstruation: a feminist critique of the political economy of menstrual hygiene management in South Asia
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DOI：
10.1080/0966369x.2014.939156
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发表时间：
2015-09-14
影响因子：
1.8
通讯作者：
Lahiri-Dutt, Kuntala
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Lahiri-Dutt, Kuntala
女性用水与男性用水的区别主要在于一个方面：清洁经血。因此，水、环境卫生和个人卫生部门承诺将妇女置于发展的中心，近年来重点关注月经问题。国际发展机构已经开始推动月经卫生管理（MHM）的议程，但他们使用的医学方法需要进行批判性的反思。本文认为，通过MHM的教训，月经是医学构造新的和压抑的期望正常的女性身体。在现有的社会文化习俗范围内，医学建筑也很难适应月经的自然生物过程。因此，人们认为，不仅需要对农村贫困妇女的身体进行消毒，而且需要将其转变为一个能够不断和正常地“履行其生产和生殖职责”的工作身体，因此，月经就与这种需要联系在一起。我注意到，医疗化的成功依赖于将身体与其所谓的废物（经血）分离。一旦月经被限制在一种病理状态，只能由医生等公共代理人和卫生巾等商业生产的商品来治疗，那么女性的定义本质就与女性身体分离了。
Women's use of water differs from men in essentially one aspect: in cleansing the body of menstrual blood. The pledge of the water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) sector to place women at the centre' of development has in recent years, therefore, come to focus on menstruation. International development agencies have begun to push the agenda of menstrual hygiene management (MHM), but their use of a medical approach requires critical rethinking. This article argues that through MHM lessons, menstruation is medicalised to construct new and repressive expectations of normality for the female body. A medical construction also poorly accommodates the natural biological process of menstruation within the gamut of existing sociocultural practices. Consequently, menstruation becomes associated with the perceived need for not only sanitisation of the female body of the rural poor, but also to turn it into a working body that is able to ceaselessly and normally' perform its productive and reproductive chores. I note that the success of medicalisation relies upon the separation of the body from its purported waste, the menstrual blood. Once menstruation is confined to a pathological condition, treatable only by public agents such as doctors and commercially produced goods such as sanitary napkins, a defining essence of womanhood is thereby dissociated from the female body.