Menstruation provides a compelling lens for examining the intersections of biology, technology, social norms, and the politics of embodiment. Scholars (including us) have increasingly used menstrual history to trace how scientific and medical understandings of the body have been shaped by—and have in turn shaped—social hierarchies, consumer cultures, and gendered expectations. From the development of menstrual hygiene products to the regulation of menstrual discourse in educational and public health contexts, the history of menstruation reveals enduring inequities in the production and dissemination of knowledge. These dynamics make menstruation history a rich site for interrogating the epistemic assumptions of the history of science, technology, and medicine.

This panel draws on recent efforts to integrate menstruation into historical narratives and collections, reflecting on the implications of this “mainstreaming” for the relatively new field of Critical Menstruation Studies. What does it mean to historicize a bodily process so often marginalized and stigmatized? Can historians contribute to changing perceptions of menstruation through education, activism, and collaboration with public institutions? What tensions emerge when histories of menstruation are used to advocate for menstrual equity? By engaging with these questions, we aim to illuminate the stakes of writing histories of a subject long deemed “unscientific” or “invisible” yet profoundly entangled with the politics of knowledge and power.

Saniya Lee Ghanoui is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at El Paso and a Research Affiliate at the Swedish Institute for North American Studies at Uppsala University. Her current book project examines the transnational history of sex education in the US and Sweden during the twentieth century. She has written widely on the history of sex and menstrual education, reproductive rights, and medicine. In addition to her academic scholarship, her public writing has appeared in Time magazine, Nursing Clio, Women’s History Network, Notches: (re)marks on the history of sexuality, and Public Books. She is producing a documentary film about the history of abortion and the 1960s thalidomide drug crisis, and is currently President-elect of the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research.

Camilla Mørk Røstvik is Associate Professor in History at the University of Agder in Norway. She specialises in twentieth and twenty-first century art histories, with a longstanding research interest in the visual culture of menstruation. Camilla is Honorary Lecturer in the School of Medicine and the School of Art History at the University of Aberdeen, and Honorary Research Fellow in Art History at the University of St Andrews. From 2018 to 2024 she was the Primary Investigator of the Wellcome Trust funded Menstruation Research Network UK. Her first monograph, Cash Flow: The Businesses of Menstruation was published with UCL Press in 2022. She is currently working on her second monograph, The Painters Are In: An Art History of Menstruation (McGill Queen’s University Press). Her newest research project is Remembering Witches, a cultural history of where and how the Nordic witch trials are memorialized.

Jana Wittenzellner is Deputy Director of the Museum Europäischer Kulturen - Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. She studied Cultural Studies and Romance studies in Bremen, Valencia and Berlin. She then worked as an Assistant Professor at Saarland University where whe completed her doctorate with a thesis on the Spanish sexual reform movement of the 1930s. Her main research interests at the Museum Europäischer Kulturen are the history of gender and sexuality.

Moderator
Jesse Olszynko-Gryn