Imagining Menstrual Futures - Panel discussion this Thursday!

and some unfiltered notes on menstrual cycle awareness and colonisation

Hello folks,

Just a quick one to remind you that the Imagining Menstrual Futures online panel discussion, hosted by Jasmine Joanes of Seeing Red? and featuring me, Monette Eiliazadeh (Founder of Nisaba) and Neelam Heera (Founder of Cysters) is happening this Thursday from 6:30pm - 8:00pm.

We’ll be talking about how we might imagine and achieve menstrual futures and menstrual justice; drawing connections across our different perspectives and lived experience.

I met Jasmine last year when she approached me about whether I’d like to be interviewed for her PhD research into contemporary menstrual activism and menstrual justice. I’ve often felt like I don’t really fit anywhere clearly within the menstrual health space, but I came away feeling really positive and inspired by the work Jasmine was doing and it gave me a new sense of where my menstrual thinking might fit within all of this (though to be honest, this is still a perpetual work-in-progress / line of inquiry within my work!)

So, I’m excited for this conversation and I’d love for you to join us if you can.

You can find a link to sign up here. (It’s FREE!!)

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Meanwhile this wee, unfiltered note below will be appearing on Instagram later today, so I thought I’d share it here first with you all.

I’m really knee-deep in thinking about how menstrual cycle awareness can be in service to system change and decolonisation at the moment. It’s something I’ve been chewing over for years. It’s like an itch I just can’t stop scratching!

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We often hear rhetoric in MCA circles that MCA is a reclamation of lost ways; that women once, long ago, paid greater attention to their cycles; that they honoured their blood and that there were rites and rituals enacted that celebrated these rhythms.

In reality we know very little about these things.

It’s true that there are a few threads to follow back down into the deep past.

However, a vast amount of ancestral and Indigenous knowledge about menstruation has been lost to colonisation and what’s left has been skewed through the lenses of predominantly white cis male anthropologists who either brushed these practices off as unimportant or distorted them into their own patriarchal interpretations.

We should be angry about this.

Knowledge lost. Never to be found again.

And in light of this, I wonder, are we also angry about contemporary colonisation?

We should be.

Whilst we MCA practitioners in the Global North are getting to reinvent our menstrual praxis, vast populations of people across the globe are having their lives decimated because of the violence of colonial force. Mothers, grandmothers, all the people who held the stories of their family’s rites of passages are dead or dying, unable to pass their family traditions and tales to their children.

Knowledge lost.

Never to be found again.

The recent news from Slow Factory about how women in Gaza were using tent material to bleed on during their periods or were desperately searching out norethisterone to halt their bleeding tells us how privileged we are to be able to pay attention to our cycles; to have room in our lives to pay attention to ourselves in this way.

We need a cycle awareness movement that is willing to engage with this privilege.

Simultaneously many MCAers talk about how working with the menstrual cycle connects us back to the body of the earth; that our own inner seasons are a fractal aspect of the oscillations of this planet.

The earth and our own bodies are inseparable.

So, if we are the earth, then surely we all feel all its pains?

And yet I still see some people teaching menstrual cycle awareness who don’t engage with the suffering in the world whatsoever.

We need a cycle awareness movement that asks why this happens and challenges this apathy.

It’s a privilege to be able to practice cycle awareness in pursuit of our own health and well-being; as a path of self-care.

We need a cycle awareness movement that recognises this; that takes a both/and approach: self and collective care (whilst recognising that collective care *is* self care).

I want a cycle awareness movement that resists contemporary coloniality, that divests from capitalist patriarchy and that commits to intersectionality.

I want a cycle awareness that unravels us from harm and extends beyond the the neo-liberal pursuit of prioritising personal ‘health’ over everything else.

Will you join me?

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Right, I’m gonna head off. Maybe see some of you on Thursday?

I hope the rest of your week sails by at a pace you can relish. Go slow and then ask yourself if you can go a little slower, is my advice (not that always take my own advice, mind).

Love, Lottie X