Berkley Conner

University of Iowa

Description of Work:

My name is Berkley Conner and I’m a graduate student at the University of Iowa. I research discourses about menstruation and am especially interested in how menstruators’ subjectivities are negotiated between their capacity as regulated spaces and their capacity to weaponize their bodies for resistive purposes. I’m currently working on my dissertation: a rhetorical history of menstrual containment. In this project, I interpret menstrual containment strategies—from their medical inception in the 1880s to the women’s health movement of the 1970s and 1980s—tracing how these strategies were gendered and raced within the national body. This project builds on ideas about rhetorical containment, illustrating how “threatening” bodies become containers, how containment is resisted, and how containment may be used for resistance.