Uniting the Nation through Transcending Menstrual Blood: The Period Products Act in Historical Perspective

Bettina Bildhauer

doi:10.16995/olh.6339

Abstract

This article situates the Period Products (Free Provision) (Scotland) Act 2021 in the context of historical imaginations both of menstruation and of the nation. It shows that despite the law- makers’ stated intentions, traditional menstrual stigma still underlies the Act and its parliamentary debates. This allows politicians speaking about menstruation to distance themselves from those who menstruate, claiming a position as part of a privileged, authoritative community, and further associating menstruation with being underprivileged. The article shows how deep and pervasive the roots of this stigmatising pattern are, tracing it back to premodern and early modern humoral medicine, specifically to Pseudo-Albertus Magnus’ Secreta mulierum (The Secrets of Women), and to modern fiction directly discussed in the Scottish parliament: the film I, Daniel Blake and Alasdair Gray’s novel Poor Things. The parliamentarians, moreover, imagine that the bonds created by speaking about menstrual blood extend to the whole nation. They implicitly understand the nation to be united by a shared blood and at the same time as transcending blood, in this case menstrual blood. This tacit conception is part of a historical pattern of similar imaginations of the Scottish nation in relation to blood, as this article will show in a sample of Scottish historical, fictional and political writing and thought from the Middle Ages to today. Menstruation in this way turns out to be central to historical and contemporary understandings of citizenship.Featured image:&nbsp;Matriline by Bibo Keeley, digital image, 2016

Highlights

This article sets the Period Products (Free Provision) (Scotland) Act 2021 (Scottish Parliament 2021) in the context of historical imaginations both of menstruation and of the nation
The second, related historical pattern of thought that recurs in the context of the Period Products Act is imagining the nation as a collective body which is united by a shared blood and which, at the same time, transcends blood, menstrual blood (Anidjar, 2014)
The Secrets of Women alleges that this impure menstrual blood polluted men during sexual intercourse, harmed the embryos conceived during menstruation, polluted pregnant and menopausal women who could not purge themselves of this toxin and even poisoned young children in their cradles when a menstruating woman looked at them (Pseudo-Albertus Magnus, 1725: 89–90)

Summary

Introduction

The Period Products Act’s treatment of menstruation can be seen as the latest iteration of this thought pattern defining the nation as both united by blood and as transcending it. The discussion about the exact limits of the ‘universal’ access along the border with England is relevant in the context of the current independence movement in Scottish politics, which tries to create a new nation state of Scotland as separate from the United Kingdom. It coincides with the renegotiation the rights of EU citizens living in the UK following Brexit. Scotland is given unity by free, universal access to period products, which keeps menstrual blood invisible in the public sphere

Shameful Menstruation and Bonding Menstrual Discourse

Findings

Conclusion