Press
Period Tracking Apps (PTAs): Reconstructing Bodies And Eroding Rights
17 Feb 2025
feminisminindia.com
Menstruation is an intersectional experience and is influenced by various identity factors, including age, occupation, class, culture, politics, and religion, as well as the menstruator’s own self-perceptions. In some cultures, menstruating women are recognised as needing rest; in others, they are ostracised. Across geographies, menstruation is associated with dirt and shame, putting pressure on menstruators to hide evidence of menstruation from public view, if not also in private, making it the ‘ultimate taboo’.
For many menstruators, the monthly menstruation experience is a dreaded time and shrouded in myths of impurity. Period tracking applications (PTAs) are regarded as helping menstruators to manage their period digitally and improve their self-understanding. However, PTA usage can have sinister consequences. While purporting to be liberating, informative, and private, they extend normative ideas of menstruation and personhood and promote an agenda of menstrual management tied to economic ambitions, all the while eroding menstruators’ privacy and security…
Bashali: A Place of Freedom
13 Jan 2025
www.period.media
The experience of menstruation, often laden with social stigma, takes on a different meaning when women have the freedom to choose how they spend this time. In the Kalasha culture of northern Pakistan, menstruating women are given the agency to retreat from their daily responsibilities and embrace a space dedicated to rest, reflection, and community. This autonomy during menstruation upholds the dignity of the experience, empowering women to honor their bodies and their needs without shame or restriction.
In the northwest region of Pakistan, the Kalasha people have thrived since the 11th century, living in the valleys of Bumburet, Birir, and Rumbur within Chitral District. This small community of around 3,000 people follows a unique cultural tradition where women are azat (free) and have chit (choice). They speak Kalasha, or Kalasha-mun, and live by customs that empower women to assert autonomy in their personal and community lives…
Feminism is Humanism: Why Period Art Matters
2 Dec 2024
www.thedreamingmachine.com
Art depicting menstruation has been around for centuries in South Asian culture, as can be seen from the 6th Century sculpture of the fertility goddess Lajja Gauri. In the west, Judith Chicago’s 1970’s work depicting the menstruation experience, ‘Red Flag’ and ‘Menstruation Bathroom,’ are widely accepted as the first of its kind in western contemporary art. The image of removing a tampon was part of Chicago’s determination to openly express her experiences as a woman. She said ‘the medium is the message,’ as she tried to abolish what she called ‘menstrual denial.’ In those days she was considered a radical artist. She explained: ‘I am trying to make art that relates to the deepest and most mythic concerns of human kind and I believe that…feminism is humanism.’
The term ‘menstrala’ or menstrual art was a term coined by Vanessa Tiegs in 2000. It was the name she gave to her 88 period paintings which she created over three years. Over the past twenty years depictions of menstruation in films, novels, comic books, art installations, graffiti and even wall murals have become more common. Most recently, the erotic finance thriller Fair Play (2023) starts with a period sex scene, where the main character Emily hooks up with her fiancé Luke at a wedding. Period blood is shown spilt all over her dress and Luke’s mouth but is treated like normal bodily fluid. The director, Chloe Domont said her aim was to show there is no disgust, no shock, just an acceptance of periods as an ordinary occurrence, as sometimes happens in real life…
Crimson Realities: Navigating the Body Politics in Period Matters: Menstruation in South Asia
1 Apr 2024
Menstruation, an intrinsically biological phenomenon, is frequently considered negatively by society. It stems from global myths, superstitions, and taboos. Farah Ahamed, a human rights lawyer and activist, effectively collated the varied menstrual experiences in her anthology Period Matters: Menstruation in South Asia. The anthology includes poetry, interviews, artwork, and other works by diverse writers, sheds light on the stigma associated with periods, and the challenges women face from menstruation.
This paper focuses on the theory of the techniques used by patriarchal societies to manage the human body, particularly that of women. It examines the experiences of numerous menstruators in the book Period Matters through a body politics lens. The study also tries to document the reality in which men objectify and control the female body. Furthermore, it investigates how numerous women have embarked on a quest to dispel stereotypes about menstruation.
South Asia’s Menstrual Revolution: Farah Ahamed’s ‘Period Matters’ Takes Center Stage.
23 Sep 2023
Medium
In wrapping up this blog post, I want to emphasize that ‘Period Matters’ is a remarkable work of literature. It serves as a comprehensive exploration of menstruation, promoting awareness, health, and hygiene. This novel serves as an inspiration for individuals to drive change, raise their voices, and break down the stigmas surrounding menstruation. Ultimately, it underscores the importance of acknowledging that periods matter, period awareness is crucial, and period rights are significant.
Review in Women’s Reproductive Health
22 May 2023
Women's Reproductive Health
Review of Period Matters by Camilla Mørk Røstvik, Associate Professor in History, University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway.
Published in Women’s Reproductive Health.
Available at Taylor & Francis Online (paywall).
Images, phrases, characters: on the literary influences on Period Matters
8 Apr 2023
Scroll.in
An essay by Farah Ahamed
Images, phrases, and characters from books that we read, films we watch, and art and music that we experience and places we visit leave impressions on our minds. Without realising it, each one, is intertwined with another and contributes to shaping our lens on the world. The iconic designer Paula Scher wrote: “We can pick our teachers and we can pick our friends and we can pick the books we read and the music we listen to and the movies we see, etcetera. You are a mashup of what you let into your life.”
In the Introduction of Period Matters: Menstruation in South Asia, I explain the idea of the book, and why I decided it must be genre crossing. Period Matters was published in July 2022, and in December that year I travelled to India to meet some of the writers and artists who had been in my mind’s eye for decades…
Farah Ahamed interviewed by Jaya Bhattacharji Rose
12 Mar 2023
Times of India
My interest in period poverty goes back to more than a decade ago. But I first came across the problem that young girls were facing more than twenty years ago, when I was working in Uganda at the Aga Khan Foundation and I came across an article in the newspaper that talked about how school girls were missing classes and exams because of their period. I was shocked to realise this. And it made me wonder how much I’d taken for granted. But it took ten years after that for my sisters and I to actually sit down and put together the idea of Panties With Purpose, which is a campaign to raise awareness and provide access to menstrual products to girls in school…
Listen to the podcast at: epaper.timesgroup.com
Where are indigenous women’s stories?
11 Mar 2023
Daily Star, Bangladesh
An extract from Period Matters was published in the Daily Star, Bangladesh, for International Women’s Day 2023.
How do woman writers write the world?
8 Mar 2023
Scroll.in
While Farah Ahamed deals with the diverseness of menstrual taboos and cultural practices (including those faced by transpeople) in South Asia in Period Matters, art historian Catherine McCormack turns an unflinching eye on the treatment of female bodies in the “masterpieces” created by male artists in her book Women in the Picture. Both books encapsulate a very particular rage of being denied the agency of your own body and having a say on its functioning – a rage that almost all women are familiar with.
Period Matters & International Women’s Day 2023
8 Mar 2023
Jaya Bhattacharji Rose
On International Women’s Day, it is worth reflecting upon this statistic. According to UNICEF’s 2019 Menstrual Hygiene report, 1.8 billion people Menstruation globally and millions of those are unable to exercise their right to good menstrual health and dignity due to discriminatory norms, cultural taboos, poverty and lack of access to basic amenities. Adolescent girls often face stigma and social exclusion during menstruation, resulting in school absenteeism and frequent dropouts. Women with lower literacy levels face additional chronic nutritional deficiencies and health problems. Cumulatively, these practices have far-reaching negative consequences on the lives of girls and women as they restrict their mobility, freedom, choices, affect attendance and participation in school and community life, compromise their safety and cause stress and anxiety…
www.jayabhattacharjirose.com/farah-ahameds-period-matters-international-womens-day-2023
What Has Dignity Got to Do with Menstrual Health?
8 Dec 2022
IANS Live
Extract from an essay in Period Matters
This essay provides an overview of the key challenges in menstrual health faced by women and adolescent girls in rural Bihar and Uttar Pradesh (UP), India, during 2018-19, within the framework of the literature on dignity. The purpose of the inquiry was to explore whether there was any link between social dimensions anchored in dignity and better menstrual health outcomes.
The literature on dignity, discussions with civil society organisations working on period poverty and menstrual health awareness both in the UK and India have been instrumental in shaping this inquiry with menstrual health and not menstrual hygiene at its centre, as has been previously done.
By situating menstruation under the ‘health’ umbrella, attention is drawn to the normal functions of the female body, the well-being of women and their families, as well as the social dimensions that affect them. The reference to hygiene, on the other hand, has connotations of cleanliness and disease prevention…
ianslive.in/news/has_dignity_got_to_do_with_menstrual_health_book_excerpt_-928272/NATION/1