Lupe Gómez always liked bumper cars.
As a young girl, she loved crashing into boys in her town at night.
“It was sensational,” she describes in an email.
Her poems contain something of that violent and feminine pleasure, flashes of countryside and intimacy that pass through the flesh like an electric discharge.
“I remember once hitting my own car and almost breaking all the teeth in my mouth.
My poems in the nineties were bumper cars that crashed against the very conservative mentality of some Galician people.”
In that decade, the author (Fisteus, Curtis, A Coruña, 1972) published books such as
Pornografía
and
Os teus dedos na miña braga con regra
(
Your fingers in my panties with a ruler
).
In them she explored issues considered scandalous such as sex, masturbation and menstruation: At school / we are inseparable.
/ With my period.
/ With your fingers / in my panties.
Those words, the writer remembers, caused a clash with “the way of understanding poetry that prevailed in the Galician cultural system.”
But Gómez's verses also represented a stir on a local scale: “The presentations of my books in Santiago were authentic explosions of love, rebellion and beauty.
They were great celebrations of the profound wonder of life.
I always had admirers, readers who showed me vivid enthusiasm, great commitment and total dedication.”
A still from the 2023 film 'Are You There, God?
It's me, Margaret', which addresses the topic of the arrival of the first menstruation.
Lions Gate (Everett Collection / Cordon Press)
These menstrual poems, like those written by authors from Emily Dickinson to Anne Sexton, have just been republished by La Uña Rota in a bilingual Spanish-Galician version.
They are part of a growing cultural trend that is rescuing the ruler from ostracism: lately, and to name just a few examples, we have seen
period
cunnilingus parade across screens and pages (in the film
Saltburn
);
recruits who open their legs in the middle of the common showers to insert a tampon (in the novel
La soldada,
by Paulina Tuchschneider, published by Periférica), and menarche (the first period) become a
leitmotif
of films such as
Red
, by Pixar, and
Are You There, God?
It's Me, Margaret,
based on a novel of the same name enormously popular among American girls since the 1970s.
Even today there are gynecological manuals that define the period in the negative: the effect of an unfertilized egg
Of course, we are not facing something new.
Not even transgressive, no matter how many people think it is.
It is an effort to normalize and remove the many stigmas that surround a natural fact that even today continues to be explained negatively in some gynecological manuals (as the result of an unfertilized egg) and for which from society, the Culture and even religion have not spared denigrating adjectives: shameful, dirty, disgusting, disgusting, abject, indecorous, smelly, toxic, indecent... “My poetry was, and continues to be, resounding, wild and libertarian.
The verses were like haikus that can be considered political proclamations or mystical revelations,” says Lupe Gómez about those poems that caused so much commotion.
What has changed in these more than two decades that separate the original publication of his books from their reissue surely has to do with a question of sensitivity and knowledge.
“Now my speech is fully installed in contemporary times.
I think that my work is received with greater respect, as if it now sounded with a kinder vibration," concedes the writer, happy to have championed a small revolution: "I feel very proud to be the author of works that at the time were considered as “banned books.”
The ban on menstruation, the culture of concealment that surrounds it, is rising.
Feminism must point this out, but, as Miren Guilló Arakistain, author of
Blood and Resistance
(Bellaterra), points out, at the same time parallel movements are perceived fostered by the “new hegemonies on the part of large corporations and their advertising.” .
At a time when there are an abundance of books aimed at educating girls and adolescents who are getting their first period, essays are being added to the shelves that address the issue from multifaceted and combative perspectives: biological, medical, anthropological, sociological, economic, political, identity... “The new generations are changing their attitude regarding their own menstruation,” notes journalist Antonio Villarreal.
“We see things like that [consumption of] the pill is going down and that people are learning not to be ashamed and not to cover their menstruation, but to try to understand the messages that their body is sending them.”
With fellow reporter María Zuil, Villarreal has just published
The half that bleeds
(Libros del KO), an essay presented with a journalistic approach that stems from an article that both authors published at the end of 2021 in
El Confidencial
.
As they explain in the first pages, that text, which remained among the most read in the newspaper for a week, generated “hundreds of comments from people with first and last names thanking in public and with great sincerity that we had taken care of a problem that, intimately, it affected them every month.”
The germ of the report arose from an issue that was ringing in many ears, but which very few were talking about: the effects of Covid vaccines on the menstrual cycles of many women.
With that topic they open their book, for which they have spent two years researching and creating a database with hundreds of surveys.
'Menstrual quipu (the blood of the glaciers)', 2006/2023, work by the Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña that represents menstruation and, at the same time, the melting of glaciers due to mining. Romina Díaz/Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Chili)
In their work, Zuil and Villarreal propose a journey through menstruation that ranges from menarche to menopause;
from medicalization to the commodification of periods;
from scientific research to menstrual “hygiene”;
from taboos to premenstrual syndrome, pain and little-studied diseases such as endometriosis, which is beginning to become popular – in part – thanks to cultural products such as Sally Rooney's novel
Random
House, adapted into an HBO series of the same name. .
Although it may be thought that The Bleeding Half offers information intended mainly for women, the authors invite all audiences to read it.
“I have a wife and a little girl, and I would like this book to be read by people like me,” says Villarreal, “so I can understand them and understand why what happens to them happens.”
In the seventies, in the midst of the second feminist wave, creators such as the American Judy Chicago raised a protest against menstrual infamy through their works of art: works that became iconic such as the photolithography
Red Flag,
a close-up of a hand extracting a tampon from the vagina, and the installation
Menstruation Bathroom
, a bathroom full of used pads and tampons scattered on the floor and in the trash can.
Currently, prominent creators such as the Velázquez Prize winner Cecilia Vicuña and the National Photography Prize winner Laia Abril continue to make periods visible and denounce the myths that tarnish it: the Chilean, through pieces such as her
Menstrual Quipus,
textile installations with a poetic background and vindictive;
and the Spanish, with photobooks such as
Menstruation Myths Portfolio Box
(Setanta), a revision of the imagery associated with periods, which wrongly links it with the phenomenon of lunar cycles, weakness and even illness (refer, in this sense, to hackneyed expression “being bad”).
The new essays address the topic from multifaceted perspectives: medical, political, economic...
The biomedical pathologization of the period is one of the several keys to the essay
Blood and Resistance,
where the professor at the University of the Basque Country Miren Guilló Arakistain carries out an exhaustive review of the alternative policies and cultures of menstruation in the first two decades of the century. XXI.
“The menstrual cycle has been little investigated due to its androcentric bias, with a Western vision that links it to dirt and taboo;
a stigmatizing vision that has enabled an entire menstrual industry and commercialization,” the author points out in an
e-mail.
“It is true that little by little there are changes: medical-health practice is becoming more plural and more and more research is being done on endometriosis, dysmenorrhea and painful periods, etc.
Research and policies that address these painful scenarios are urgently needed, and it is important to look at health from intersectional perspectives and that take into account structural factors, such as precarious, environmental and economic living conditions in this neoliberal culture that holds everyone responsible. which of their own well-being and health.”
In the face of dehumanizing capitalism, people and groups are organizing to carry out actions framed in the so-called “menstrual activism.”
As Guilló Arakistain explains, it is about standing up to “cultural hegemonies, problematizing and redefining the menstrual cycle through alternative practices and imaginaries,” which includes exercises such as the creation of “artistic works, workshops, fanzines, proposals in bleeding management…”
That, without forgetting the relatively recent leading role of the internet and social networks, a global forum for sharing and obtaining information in which, at the national level, figures such as the pedagogue Erika Irusta and the nurse Xusa Sanz stand out.
“There are groups everywhere: on Facebook, on Instagram…,” María Zuil emphasizes.
“There are dissemination accounts like there have never been before, and that is allowing there to be specific campaigns, for example, against menstrual poverty [the difficulty in purchasing products such as pads, tampons and cups, whose index in Spain is around 20 %]”.
A frame from 'Red' (2022), a Pixar film whose protagonist is a 13-year-old girl who gets her period for the first time.
Lifestyle pictures / Alamy / CORDON PRESS
Another theme that runs through several of these essays is that of periods in relation to sexual and gender identity.
“When you study menstrual experiences, you can observe the great bodily and menstrual diversity that exists, since not all women menstruate for very different reasons and people who do not (self-)identify as women do,” illustrates Miren Guilló Arakistain.
Whether they are women, trans men or non-binary people, people who periodically expel their endometrial tissue agree on one thing: the uterus, the organ to which the American midwife Leah Hazard (
The Uterus
, Salamander) dedicates her new book, a transversal look that It covers, in addition to the period, issues ranging from reproduction to diseases that affect the womb, and which adds to recent publications such as
Pussypedia
(Larousse), an illustrated “total guide” to everything related to the female genital tract.
Science is confirming that the end of the reproductive function produces changes in the brain
If life continues its course, there will be no menstruation without menopause, an experience equally normative but perhaps even more vilified, given its association with the end of the reproductive stage and the entry into maturity.
If with menarche it is said that the girl “becomes a woman,” in the collective imagination this transition seems to be reversed with the climacteric (the cessation of the reproductive function), presented as “the mother of all misfortunes.”
The menopausal industry built around this false notion, “which includes the pharmaceutical, medical and aesthetic industries,” as Anna Freixas writes, “has been sustained largely through the link that in our society has been established between menopause and old age = ugliness.”
Author of
Our Menopause,
a 2007 essay that has just been republished by Captain Swing, Freixas offers in her text a necessary vindication of the dignity of this phase of existence: she joyfully invokes freedom, celebration, reconciliation with the body …Perhaps due to this enthusiasm, it is striking that, as a counterpoint to the virtues of menopause, reproductive hormones are repeatedly referred to as a “veil obscuring vision.”
Science is confirming, in any case, that the end of menstruation promotes changes in the brain.
And, contrary to popular belief, which anticipates a loss of capabilities, it is a renewing transformation.
It is exposed in
The Renewed Woman
(Salamandra) by the American doctor Louann Brizendine, author of titles such as
The Female Brain
(also in Salamandra).
After the arrival of it in the middle of age, there is still a lot of life after menopause.
In her book, Brizendine—who also alludes to the effect of fertility hormones with categorical expressions such as “violent waves” and “tortured state of mind”—provides a list of the qualities that emerge from the calm waters of this new stage: candor , concentration, inner approval, renewed audacity, expansive character, freedom.
“The renewed woman (…) can believe that she does know everything and that one day younger women and all men will understand it,” notes Brizendine.
We will see.
For now, it sounds promising.
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