Threads, feminist health, politics & experiences

Threads combines quotes, excerpts, writings, personal stories and images to explore different experiences of the menstrual cycle and to take a critical look at how western medicine defines women’s bodies and experiences.

It looks at changes that can be experienced throughout the menstrual cycle like changes in body fluids, the position of the womb, temperature, dreams, sensory perception, and includes writing about various understandings of menstruation that predate reductionist western science. It also gives an outline of how awareness of the changes that can happen during the menstrual cycle can be used as a method of contraception.

It expands on some of those changes and looks at both different experiences of and the politics of what gets called ‘PMS’. It looks at why western medicine defines a whole breadth of cyclical experiences people assigned female at birth can have as illness.

Threads also looks at some of the history of western anatomy and at different understandings of the body like those found in Chinese Medicine. It particularly explores the history of the way female anatomy has been defined and discussed and includes a mass of radical information about female anatomy and sexuality that comes directly from women’s own observations.

A new Active printing of this publication first written in 2010.