The curse: menstruation, medicine and femininity, 1800-1969

在整个19世纪和20世纪，月经作为一个生理过程及其与女性身份的关系的理解一直在医学，经验和文化背景下重新谈判。借鉴文学和文化研究的解释方法，这本专著通过探索在复杂的社会，经济和文化变革背景下月经经验的竞争故事之间的紧张关系，标志着历史分析的新方向。这部著作的出版将具有跨学科的意义：它在医学和文化之间的矩阵中运作;质疑消费文化对塑造个人经验的影响;研究性的历史;展示了（和勾结）之间的概念现代性和传统/知识和无知。尽管兴趣的理论性别体现，月经作为一个合法的主题，为严重的历史调查，在现代时期仍然没有探索。相反，研究主要是跨文化信仰/实践的人类学调查，吸血鬼的文学和电影研究，以及热衷于打破禁忌的女权主义文本。针对这一空白，我的专著通过将19和20世纪世纪医学、流行和消费文化中的月经叙事定位为理解女性身份转变概念的关键，为性别辩论做出了重要贡献。19世纪世纪月经的医学范式是根据疾病和错过的概念构建的，它宣称了19世纪70年代以来女性气质的内在弱点和不稳定性，然而，随着妇女在临床实践和研究方面的专业机会扩大，以及对妇女权利的呼声越来越高，这种说法越来越受到挑战。从世纪末开始，女性创作的新月经叙事从消极的修辞转向了现代、健康和活力的语言。随着女性从业者发起运动，将青春期女孩从无知和残疾的流行月经文化中解放出来，这种“新”知识的传播不断升级。世纪早期还出现了卫生产品的大众营销，杂志消费的增长以及月经与排卵有关的功能的“发现”（对避孕的理解具有根本意义）。20世纪30年代初，“经前紧张”的概念进入了医学领域，后来进入了公共领域。这本书评估了月经叙事如何成为性别谈判的争议场所，评估了月经的“新”概念如何促进了女性作为自己命运的情妇而不是生物学受害者的看法。医学范式的转变是在商业产品广告、女权主义和妇女不断扩大的社会、政治和经济机会的更广泛背景下发生的。支撑这本书的假设是，尽管有人故意试图将世纪的月经叙事诋毁为基于无知和禁忌的神话，但现代结构创造了一个复杂但规范的月经礼仪版本，首先，月经是有问题的和禁忌的概念，其次，对女性气质的看法是婚姻和母亲的特权。

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, understandings of menstruation as a physiological process and its relation to feminine identity were consistently re-negotiated within a medical, experiential and cultural context. Drawing on the interpretative methods of literary and cultural studies, this monograph marks a new direction in historical analysis by exploring the tensions between competing stories of menstrual experience in the context of complex social, economic and cultural change. Publication of this work will have cross-disciplinary relevance: it operates within the matrix between medicine and culture; questions the influence of cultures of consumption in shaping private experience; engages with the history of sexuality; and demonstrates the conflict (and collusion) between conceptions of modernity and tradition/ knowledge and ignorance.Despite interest in theories of gendered embodiment, menstruation as a legitimate subject for serious historical inquiry in the Modern period remains unexplored. Instead, research is dominated by anthropological surveys of cross-cultural belief/practice, literary and film studies of vampirism, and feminist texts keen to explode taboo. Addressing this gap, my monograph makes an important contribution to debates on gender by situating menstrual narratives in 19th and 20th century medical, popular and consumer culture as pivotal to understanding shifting conceptions of feminine identity.Constructed in terms of illness and missed conception, 19th century medical paradigms of menstruation proclaimed the inherent weakness and instability of femininity from the1870s, however, such narratives were increasingly challenged as women's professional opportunities in clinical practice and research expanded alongside growing calls for women's rights. From the end of the century, new menstrual narratives authored by women shifted from the rhetoric of negativity to embrace a language of modernity, health and vitality. The dissemination of this 'new' knowledge escalated as female practitioner's campaigned to liberate adolescent girls from a popular menstrual culture of ignorance and disability. The early 20th century also saw the emergence of mass-marketing for sanitary products, the growth In magazine consumption and the 'discovery' of menstruation's function in relation to ovulation (of fundamental significance to understandings of contraception). In the early 1930s, the concept of 'pre-menstrual tension' entered the medical and, later, the public domain.Assessing the ways in which menstrual narratives became a contested site for the negotiation of gender, the book evaluates how 'new' concepts of menstruation promoted a perception of women as mistresses of their own destiny rather than victims of their biology. The shifting medical paradigms are situated within the broader context of commercial product advertising, feminism and expanding social, political and economic opportunities for women. The hypothesis underpinning the book is that, despite deliberate attempts to discredit 19th century menstrual narratives as myths based on ignorance and taboo, modern constructs created a sophisticated but prescriptive version of menstrual etiquette which remained tied, firstly, to conceptions of menstruation as problematic and taboo and, secondly, to perceptions of femininity that privileged marriage and motherhood.