The Menstrual Imaginary in Literature

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 and problematic societal views of menstruation.

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.

“This beautifully-written, ambitious, and unusually creative book is a delight to all who care about feminism, embodiment, and menstruation. Dyer brilliantly recasts key writers and thinkers—Irigaray, Plath, Cixous, and Kristeva—as part of the menstrual story, and in doing so, cracks open the field of critical menstruation studies even further. Entering Dyer’s world of the menstrual imaginary offers a viscerally pleasurable and intellectually provocative experience that is not to be missed.” (Breanne Fahs, Professor of Women and Gender Studies at Arizona State University, USA, and author of Out for Blood: Essays on Menstruation and Resistance (2016) and Burn It Down!: Feminist Manifestos for the Revolution (2020))
“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)