Title: Graduate Student
University: University of Iowa
Email: berkley-conner@uiowa.edu
Description of your work
My research broadly examines medical and public discourse surrounding menstruation and menstrual health. I am interested in how menstruators’ subjectivities are negotiated between their capacity as regulated spaces and their capacity to weaponize their bodies for resistive purposes. A blend of historical, archival, and feminist approaches allows me to build on rhetorical conversations about dominance, resistance, and agency through a rhetorical history of menstruation. At present, my work is focused on modes of rhetorically containing menstruators’ bodies and menstrual blood as well as the ways in which menstruators might resist containment through rhetorical and material acts of flow. I am currently developing two essays as I complete my graduate coursework. The first analyzes a physical education pamphlet from the 1930s and interrogates the framing of the menstruating body’s vitality through containment rhetoric. The second suggests a more literal understanding of rhetorics of containment, and the capacity to disrupt the contained body, through an analysis of a marathon runner’s decision to free bleed.