Blood and pollution: visualisations of menstrual flow in contemporary art

ABSTRACT

Nowadays menstrual blood is the only kind that neo-capitalist patriarchal decorum will not tolerate. At a time when the visual industry has successfully monetarised the "seduction of blood", the representation of this type of female fluid remains completely barred and relegated to invisibility. The identification of menstrual blood with pollution has become a hegemonic cultural construct that seeks to safeguard the ideals of purity and whiteness through which women's bodies are socially coded. Contemporary artistic practice has reacted against this state of affairs by turning this cultural dirtiness into a political tool with which to expand the limits of female body experience. From the early 1970s to the present, a number of women artists have made crucial contributions to this field of work known as menstrual art, in which the primary aim has been to formulate an alternative image of periods that could put women back in control of the most intimate aspects of their physical and emotional identity

RESUMEN

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