Glover, Bridgette Grace

Hopgood, Fincina

Waters, Sophia

Ford, Jessica

2025-03-25

<p>For much of screen media history, menstruation has been represented through minor plotlines and brief sequences as an experience marked by shame, embarrassment and trauma, and as such, these portrayals contribute significantly to menstrual stigma. Since 2015, however, there has been a boom in menstrual visibility across media platforms and popular culture, with depictions of unruly menstruators, monstrous menstruation and period sex populating the Anglophone Western media landscape. </p> <p>In this thesis, I propose the term “screen renaissance” to describe the recent cycle of film and television texts produced since 2015 that reflect a growing awareness that menstruation is a complex issue that affects different stages of life and is experienced by diverse groups of people, not just cis-gendered girls and women. This thesis makes visible screen media’s rarely recognised contribution to the cultural reframing of menstruation, which sees an important shift away from stigmatised menstrual narratives towards counterstories of inclusivity, embodiment and resistance. </p> <p>This thesis traces the history of screen media’s problematic framing of menstruation and examines how recent “screen renaissance” narratives respond to and are influenced by the rise of menstrual activism and awareness since 2015. To illustrate the dialogic relationship between screen media and critical menstrual activism, the thesis deploys a thematic structure that combines a comprehensive survey of screen texts with close textual analyses of selected case studies across a range of genres, including (but not limited to) <i>Big Mouth</i> (2017- ), <i>I Love Dick</i> (2016-2017), <i>Broad City</i> (2014-2019), <i>The Witch</i> (2015) and <i>Fleabag</i> (2016-2019).</p> <p>This interdisciplinary project engages with the fields of feminist media studies and critical menstruation studies to investigate how stories of menstruation are told through screen media, specifically film, television and other forms such as social media. As a study of representations, this doctoral project is grounded in the discipline of media and communications, but it has important links with the fields of gender studies and human rights that connect it with broader political and philosophical debates within feminism, and issues of women’s rights, health and wellbeing.</p>

https://hdl.handle.net/1959.11/69189

en

University of New England

Reframing Menstruation: Exploring Menstruation, Feminism and Activism on Screen

Thesis Doctoral

Publication