Overview
- Highlights contemporary feminist scholarship and activism as well as the various treatments of menstruation among critical theorists
- Unites critical menstrual studies with literary studies
- Argues for re-envisioning menstruation and creativity in reaction to ongoing inequities surrounding menstruation
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender (PSRG)
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Table of contents (9 chapters)
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Front Matter
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What Is the Menstrual Imaginary?
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Front Matter
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The Menstrual Imaginary Against-the-Grain
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Front Matter
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Re-Imagined and New Menstrual Tales
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book draws on literary, cultural, and critical examples forming a menstrual imaginary—a body of work by women writers and poets that builds up a concept of women’s creativity in an effort to overturn menstrual prejudice. The text addresses key arbiters of the menstrual imaginary in a series of letters, including Sylvia Plath the initiator of ‘the blood jet’, Hélène Cixous the pioneer of a conceptual red ink and the volcanic unconscious, and Luce Irigaray the inaugurator of women’s artistic process relative to a vital flow of desire based in sexual difference. The text also undertakes provocative against-the-grain re-readings of the Medusa, the Sphinx, Little Red Riding Hood, and The Red Shoes, as a means of affirmatively and poetically re-imagining a woman’s flow. Natalie Rose Dyer argues for re-envisioning menstrual bleeding and creativity in reaction and resistance to ongoing andproblematic societal views of menstruation.
Reviews
“As you take this remarkable journey through the feminist menstrual imaginary, Natalie Rose Dyer provides an innovative and energetic intersectional reading of sexual difference and menstrual activism. In an equally intriguing poetic intervention and a convincing argument, Rose Dyer outlines how menstrual activism subverts patriarchal power structures by embracing the specificities and creative potential the embodied experience of menstruation offers. Her concept of the ‘menstrual imaginary’ playfully and provocatively dismantles the overlapping systems of power colonizing the disorganized material flows of women’s bodies. This is a bold and extraordinarily perceptive rethinking of the feminist politics of corporeality.” (Adrian Parr, Professor of Public Affairs and UNESCO Chair of Water and Human Settlements, University of Texas at Arlington, USA)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Natalie Rose Dyer teaches creative writing and literary studies at Deakin University, Australia. Her poetry and essays appear in literary journals such as Meanjin Quarterly, Australian Poetry, Cordite Poetry Review, Mascara Literary Review, The University of Canberra Vice-chancellors International Poetry Prize Anthologies, The Chiron Review, The Wisconsin Review, and more.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Menstrual Imaginary in Literature
Book Subtitle: Notes on a Wild Fluidity
Authors: Natalie Rose Dyer
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59813-6
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-59812-9Published: 22 November 2020
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-59815-0Published: 22 November 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-59813-6Published: 21 November 2020
Series ISSN: 2662-9364
Series E-ISSN: 2662-9372
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIV, 250
Topics: Contemporary Literature, Literary Theory, Gender Studies, Literature, general, Media and Communication