A Period Piece that Endures

Abstract

Raegan Truax's Sloughing (San Francisco, 2017) is a durational performance during which thirty-five women and genderqueer individuals bleed on plywood boards in public. Performed over twenty-eight consecutive days, Sloughing confronts its viewer with a bleeding body unaccompanied by injury, wound or puncture. ‘A Period Piece that Endures: Twenty-eight reflections on Sloughing’ explores a choice and desire to bleed seeping into public consciousness. The article offers a poetic exchange between Truax and Sloughing performer, scholar Alexis Bard Johnson, which weaves together formal analysis, comparisons, reflections and interviews to ask: what is the value of making menstruation visible? How does menstrala art allow us to renegotiate our relationship to blood and its visibility? What feelings occur? What political work is possible? Attending to these questions, Truax and Johnson confront a range of views about the bleeding body, gender, protest, endurance, tactical performance, queer feminism and collective worldmaking during a time of heightened political organizing around bodily autonomy for women, trans, and genderqueer people in the United States.