Menstrualityand FeministWorld-Making

Alessandra, Hannah, June and Anjali all described turning to menstruality at moments when their menstrual cycles had become sites of distress, disruption, or long-standing bodily struggle. Alessandra went on the pill at sixteen, having absorbed the message that menstruation was “gross” and something to conceal, and stayed on it for over a decade. Coming off it at thirty, she found cycles that left her debilitated — and, eventually, a diagnosis of stage three endometriosis.

What followed was not treatment but a series of closed doors. Specialists who did not take insurance. Surgery, or a return to the pill. Hannah, twenty years younger and in a lesbian relationship, met the same recommendation and could not get an answer as to why: “I was like, why? Surely it's easier for me to do something else.” Blood tests came back inconclusive. The consultations, she said, just went nowhere.

Anna reads these encounters through Martin's caution about how casually the pill is prescribed as a universal solution, and Bobel's account of menstrual suppression — where relieving women of “the mess, the fuss, the discomfort, and the expense” of menstruation rests on an unspoken premise that menstruation has no value. Read through Foucault's docile body, suppression becomes one mechanism by which bodies are disciplined into predictability.

Not every pathway ran through pain. Harper described indifference rather than stigma; Lotte, diagnosed with PCOS at twenty-three, had followed a highly academic life “outside of the body”; Noor simply met Julie. What these accounts share is not a symptom but a shortfall: a growing sense that the available frameworks did not describe the experience they were having.

It begins practically: nutrition, movement, and above all cycle tracking — a journal of mood, energy and physical state across the month. Every informant named it as the starting point. From there the four seasons model gives the fluctuation a shape, and informants begin speaking of my inner winter, my inner spring.

The shift is perceptual before it is anything else. Following Csordas, embodiment is not a state but an active process through which attention is directed and sensation is interpreted. Fatigue and irritability, once sudden and overwhelming, become situated inside a rhythm — anticipated rather than endured. The body stops being something that fails and becomes something that communicates.

But heightened attention does not produce harmony. It brings affective dissonance into focus: Hemmings' term for the gap between an embodied sense of self and the self one is expected to be. Noor's account is the sharpest — learning her cycle made her feel not crazy anymore, which reveals how thoroughly cyclical variation had been internalised as personal instability, against a long cultural history of hysteria, PMS, and the myth of the irrational female.

From there it scales outward into time itself. Anjali stops earning her rest. Harper builds the month around the bleed. Lotte opens meetings with a cycle check-in so a team can read “what powers are in the room.” Against the via positiva that Pope and Wurlitzer say reigns supreme in Western culture, the via negativa — contraction, withdrawal, receptivity — is reinstated as generative rather than as a pause.

Anna does not let this settle comfortably. Tracking symptoms and correcting one's lifestyle blurs into self-surveillance; framing wellbeing as a matter of sufficient awareness hands the whole burden to the individual woman. And the ability to rest during menstruation is not evenly distributed — it presupposes flexibility, economic security, and professional autonomy. Menstruality occupies an ambivalent position, and the thesis keeps it there.

The Moon Soul Community meets monthly from April to October, capped at ten women a year to hold intimacy and continuity. Julie, its facilitator, built it online after finding little appetite locally in Crete for open conversation about menstruation and cyclical living — and in doing so found the women already oriented toward the questions.

Each session opens with a grounding ritual: feet on the floor, eyes closed, an invitation to cross a threshold. Participants build small altars from objects standing for air, water, fire and earth, hold soil, feel water, sense a candle's warmth. The four archetypes — Maiden, Mother, Wild Woman, Wise Woman — are introduced not as identities but as invitations, and Julie unsettles the ranking that treats the post-menopausal stages as decline rather than as heightened clarity and authority.

Anna reads the ritual through Federici's re-enchantment: capitalism required the destruction of embodied, nature-based knowledge because that knowledge was a source of autonomy. Altar-making, elemental symbolism and cyclical reflection reclaim a fragment of it. Following Ahmed, ritual works as reorientation — not adding meaning to experience but changing how experience is sensed in the first place.

The Circle then functions as a commons of care: a space where knowledge is not generated in the self but co-constructed through dialogue, resonance and recognition, and where care is neither privatised nor individualised. Mathilde had met menstruality through books; in the Circle she found “there was much more to it” when it was shared. Read alongside hooks on consciousness-raising, the confessional becomes a healing ritual and the first step toward a political feminist consciousness.

That it happened over Zoom is not incidental. Following Boellstorff, the virtual is not the opposite of the real. The Circle became one of Berlant's intimate publics — strangers connected through circulated feeling — and one of Tsing's latent commons: fragile coordination emerging from shared vulnerability rather than shared identity. Candles, altars and bodily sensation travelled through the screen intact.