Technologies and Intimate Norms: Menstrual Management and Menstrual Suppression

• In Event: 343 - Section on Medical Sociology Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 24. Gender, Sexuality, and Health

Abstract

Menstrual suppression birth control pills have often been presented as a controversial new technology with the potential to radically change women’s lives. This article examines these pills in the historical context of other commercially produced menstrual technologies and the shifting intimate norms – norms that regulate which bodily practices are considered intimate and how intimate bodily care should be managed – produced along with them. I argue that menstrual suppression birth control biomedicalizes intimate norms of menstruation. To do so, I first trace how newly available, commercially produced menstrual technologies of the early 20th century were co-produced with intimate norms of embodied self-presentation and public discourses. I situate the case of menstrual suppression in the context of processes of biomedicalization and the emergence of lifestyle drugs, using the example of web-based marketing for menstrual suppression to show how menstrual suppression birth control is co-produced with biomedicalized intimate norms. By making lifestyle concerns into prescribing guidelines, biomedicalized intimate norms constitute alternative forms of clinical judgment for medical professionals prescribing lifestyle drugs. The biomedicalization of intimate norms in the context of intimate industries thus has potential implications not only for the meanings attached to menstrual suppression pills and their use, but for who is able to access and use these and other contraceptive technologies.

Author

• Katie Ann Hasson, University of Southern California