Bleeding in the Field: Reflections on Fieldwork and Menstruation
by Chandreyee Goswami
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Chandreyee Goswami is a PhD student in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. Her research broadly looks at university friendships of women students in Northeast India. She has just completed her fieldwork and is currently at the preliminary stage of writing up her thesis.
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I am writing this blog post as an early career researcher, a cis-woman PhD student who recently completed fieldwork. I want to offer some reflections on ‘women’ doing research, including fieldwork. However, I intend to write this blog to reach out to all people who bleed as well as those who do not, but are affected by menstrual norms (Rydstrom, 2020). Menstruation is just the tip of the iceberg to draw attention to women’s and trans people’s reproductive health.
Everything was seemingly fine. I was at home, I celebrated the new year with my parents, spent the first day with my closest friends, and then prepared to leave for the field the next day after a week of break. I was about to leave, but was suddenly shaken by intense emotions. For two days, I attempted to control my emotions as I did not want to tense anyone in the family. Maa just came to check if I was ready to leave, and as soon as I saw her, I broke down and cried. I don’t remember the last time when I cried like this. My extreme display of emotions took my mother aback. I somehow tried to gather myself to tell her something was happening to me, and I think it was due to PMS (premenstrual syndrome). That was the first time I was saying these words aloud, not just to Maa but also to myself. For some time, I knew in my heart that this unwarranted sense of emotional upheaval might have to do with my menstruating body. But I was pushing that thought away. This refusal to acknowledge it was not because of the taboo associated with menstruation or because I was uncomfortable talking about it. Rather, it was because I took it for granted. I was not reflecting consciously on how periods could mess up my fieldwork and bring me to the edge of having a mental and emotional breakdown.
Once I said it aloud, I felt relatively calm. I was now consciously thinking about PMS and menstruation. My mother did not completely understand, but still did not argue at that moment. As a woman who had bled for most of her life, and had now passed through menopause, she might have experienced something similar in her time. But who even talks about menstruation and its related issues? I realised that as a woman doing a PhD, neither I, my PhD cohort, nor the faculty and course organisers of the doctoral training programmes in my university (or, I’m sure, in other universities) had considered menstruation as a subject matter to be discussed while preparing for fieldwork, or in general during doctoral research.
After returning from fieldwork, when I discussed these issues with my friends and colleagues in PhD, I realised most had similar experiences during their fieldwork. Yet, we hardly shared these experiences. The reasons can range from normalising such menstruation-related problems to believing that talking about them may make women look ‘weak’. All these reasons have their implicit politics. These politics feed into the larger politics of silence around menstruation and, broadly, women’s reproductive health. The way menstruation has been pathologised, and women dismissed as over-emotional, ‘irrational’ behaviour and incapable of doing critical work while menstruating, contributes to the larger politics of silence around menstruation (Sveinsdóttir et al., 2002) (Bobel et al., 2020). No wonder it took me so much time to acknowledge that periods were messing up my mind from time to time during fieldwork.
As a PhD student, before going for my fieldwork, I considered that I had the required knowledge and contingency plans to tackle any problem, unanticipated situation, or risks in the field. This confidence was shaped by my training as a doctoral candidate and through a continuous flow of interaction with my wider PhD cohort. However, nobody ever raised the question or issue of what to do if I had a scheduled meeting with my research participants while experiencing acute stomach cramps. Nobody ever asked me what would happen if I felt awful and overwhelmed. Nobody ever warned me that I might have to continue using the same pad or tampon for the whole day because of the relentless pace of fieldwork or the dearth of facilities.
The first situation, in which a researcher experiencing cramps has a scheduled interview to attend or is required to complete an experiment, concerns how menstruation may affect researchers at the decision-making level in the field and otherwise during our research. As researchers, we tend to prioritise our research to avoid missing out on anything. In situations where our bodies do not support us, even then, we tend to overlook it at the cost of our health. The pressure to be ‘productive’ and to do both productive and reproductive work usually echoes in academia (Lahiri-Dutt, 2015). The universities, increasingly shaped by the neoliberal ethic of profit maximisation, are based on ableist attitudes which consider every individual from students to staff, as ‘able-bodied’ individuals (Mountz et al., 2015). This ableism dismisses any different experience and reality such as chronic illness, neurodiversity, menstruation, and menopause, as they are seen as obstacles to fulfilling the demands of performing, producing, and delivering in the neoliberal university (Brown & Leigh, 2020). Looking back at my fieldwork, I would have perhaps not felt that dilemma when I had to go out to meet a participant while experiencing excruciating pain, had I been primed to consider the possibility of such situations beforehand. I was not prepared to tackle this ‘problem’ during my research because of the entrenched notion of researchers as able bodies with the ability to align with the institutional level of productivity at a compressed time.
The second situation concerning anxiety and feeling overwhelmed is about how PMS can mess up our minds to the extent that work, and indeed life becomes unbearable. In my case, the awful and pathetic feeling I experience is inexplicable. The overwhelming emotions I feel take a toll on my ability to continue with the demands of my research. However, this is not to suggest that such inordinate feelings are intrinsic to menstruation. Not every menstruator may experience anxiety during PMS, nor such emotional experience necessarily be negative (Bobel et al., 2020) (Rydstrom, 2020) (Lese, 2016). Expressing my personal experience with menstruation during fieldwork is a way to share with my fellow researchers and future generation of researchers that feeling anxious during periods can be a part of life. Reflecting on my fieldwork, I would have slowed down during those days had I been primed to identify that the hormonal changes in my menstruating body had partly caused those heightened feelings.
The third situation, which is about infrastructural facilities, is also the point which gets the most attention when we talk specifically about problems researchers may encounter in the field—access to bathrooms, sanitary products, running water, and places to dispose of and sterilise them. There is also an unspoken understanding that certain ‘fields’ might be more difficult concerning access to washrooms and other infrastructural support. While some fields may not have favourable conditions for accessing bathrooms, the difficulty lies in the belief that menstruating researchers should have the know-how on how to deal with such situations. Further, universities tend to believe that they have better infrastructural facilities for menstruating bodies. Just having bathrooms does not mean that the issues related to menstruation have been taken care of. In fact, universities are yet to take adequate measures to address questions of period poverty to their full potential (Cardoso et al., 2021) (Mountz et al., 2015). Thus, in my experience, universities, and specifically their doctoral training programmes, do not do enough to address any issue that may emerge due to menstruation.
With this blog post, I intend to start a conversation about menstruation in academia. Based on my experiences as a menstruating body in the field, I have realised menstruation is not just less talked about as part of the self-care practices of the researcher (Das, 2023). Talking less would have still implied that menstruation is at least considered a topic of discussion. The problem is that menstruation is not even considered a theme for discussion within doctoral programmes and broadly in academic structures. The extent to which menstruators’ bodies and the related issues with menstruation are normalised and invisibilised is nauseating, yet unsurprising. The heteronormative, patriarchal norms constantly work to trivialise, invisibilise, and normalise menstruators’ difficult experiences. Such reticence around menstruation gives us a glimpse of how academic structures are under the clutches of the ableist, patriarchal and neoliberal forces that constantly push us to optimise our use of time and be ‘productive’.
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