Abstract
In The Managed Body: Developing Girls and Menstrual Health in the Global South, Chris Bobel invites us to consider critically the fast-growing menstrual hygiene management (MHM) movement. In this lengthy, yet endlessly captivating read, Bobel asserts that MHM organizations’ activism has a dangerously misguided focus. Efforts that aim to disarm the menstrual taboo rely almost entirely on producing, marketing, and distributing innovative menstrual products to seemingly needy communities, ultimately forgoing social change in favor of consumption and accommodating the very stigma they claim to challenge. Further muddying MHM’s activism is an inattentiveness to how their messages reify racist assumptions about the areas of the world these organizations primarily serve referred to, by Bobel, as the “Global South” (p. 6). Influenced by her work as a women’s, gender, and sexuality scholar and her two-decades-long commitment to researching menstrual activism, Bobel offers a rich critique of MHM discourse informed by postcolonial feminist thought that privileges intersections among gender, race, and class.
Bobel’s book stems from two interrelated research questions: “how do MHM campaigns frame the problem they seek to solve through their work and how do they frame those solutions?” (p. 28). To approach answers to these questions, she conducts a frame analysis that allows her to mine MHM’s discourse, gathered from social media, MHM literature, media coverage, and interviews with MHM’s leaders and supposed beneficiaries, to determine how activists package their messages to attract supporters. Her analysis is guided by grounded theory, a method of data collection untethered from a specific hypothesis, to produce an invested critique that productively troubles some of the core assumptions of a movement for which she cares deeply. The result is a monograph that does not necessarily build on theory but introduces a complex case study to scholarly conversations attentive to the junction of gender-based oppression and neoliberalism.
Part I establishes context, emphasizes some of the key tensions of MHM, and outlines the movement’s history and scope. Attention is shown to the ways the monolithic “girl” is treated as a resource; MHM assumes, according to Bobel, that investing in her will bring about positive economic change. Within the scope of MHM, the key to unlocking the girl’s potential is to obtain menstrual products, and Bobel artfully illustrates how this notion allows MHM to become tainted by neocolonialism.
Part II focuses on how MHM manufactures the problem of menstruation in the Global South through three interconnected frames: the precarity of girlhood in the Global South, menstruation as a hygienic crisis, and a lack of access to “appropriate” menstrual products (p. 122). Embedded in the book is a critique of the spectacle of the girl in the Global South who is in need of a White savior.
Part III explores how, as a solution to the problem of menstruation, MHM invokes biological citizenship to construct a “good menstruator,” which relies on a one-two punch of racialized and gendered notions of embodiment and civility and the commodification of technological “fixes” (p. 263). Key is Bobel’s discussion of “management.” By focusing on ways to manage menstruators’ bodies, she argues, MHM directs its efforts toward controlling a body deemed unruly rather than acknowledging the menstruating body as a site of power, knowledge, or even pleasure. She concludes by urging us to reframe the problem: Stigma, not access to products, must be addressed and corrected on a sociocultural level in an intersectional manner that accounts for the holistic experiences of girls and women.
Bobel is successful in her efforts to both complicate burgeoning and impactful activism and designate menstruation as a topic worthy of academic inquiry; the latter is especially difficult to accomplish, given the taboo nature of the subject. And, yet, Bobel’s (surprisingly rhetorical) analysis dismantles the machinery of a splashy, if well-meaning, social movement to reveal complexity with stakes. Given the intricacy of MHM’s goals, this book will not only appeal to those interested in the topic but also to those who research race, globalization, transnationalism, rhetoric, feminism, public health, gender, activism, or economics. This book is fertile ground upon which to cultivate conversations about embodied and community-oriented approaches to social justice work which are crucial in the face of approaches that privilege products over people. Embracing bodies helps us address embodied needs, and this is perhaps the most radical form of activism.
