Bloody Others Move: A Lyric Towards Menstrual Imagination

Abstract

Within the cultural complex of menstrual panic, menstrual meaning is overdetermined; psychological space is small, imagination withered. Bloody others are those psychic images of menstrual filiation who are regulated to the borderlands of subjectivity and cultural spaces. Menstrually stained, denied fluid, creative potential, they are kept stagnant, dogmatic, and virginal. This dissertation evokes ethical intimacy with this deadlock of menstrual panic. It hovers between Post-Jungian psychologies’ devotional encouragement of the protean imaginary of embodied psychic realities, and feminist and menstrual activist ideas of intersectionality and queering menstruation. Amplification through the mythic figures of Pan (god of panic, (psychic) rape, subtle body, instinct, and nature) and Nymphs serves as an imaginal lens. An arts-based lyric inquiry hosts eight prominent imaginal figures and their fantasies/ideologies enacting through menstrual research: Cyborg, Paleo Woman, Hysteric, Mother, Ascetic, Savior, Native, and By-Product. The possibilities of their functions to suppress, protect, ascend, or resist immediate menstrual experience are entertained. Narratives of anthropology, transhumanism, biological determinism, patriarchy, transcendence, sociology, gender binaries, interiority, and cognitive mythology are put at risk. In sticking to images of menstrual panic, evocative writing performs a therapy of menstrual ideas, moistening menstrual imagination. From here, this research asks: What embodied movements might grow at the borders of the personal, the collective, and the unknown, if the autonomy of bloody others is extended spaces to body forth? From here, the research offers an aesthetic reading towards greater menstrual aliveness for all.