Truth Scribbled in Blood: Women's Work, Menstruation and Poetry

Inspired by Hélène Cixous's ‘The laugh of the Medusa’, this paper revisits a public uproar over menstruation in the workplace triggered by a statement from the CEO of New Zealand's largest body of private sector employers, that periods make women take more sick leave than men. The utteranc...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Gender, work, and organization work, and organization, 2015-03, Vol.22 (2), p.94-111
Main Authors: Sayers, Janet Grace, Jones, Deborah
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Cixous
equal pay
Females
Feminism
Gender equity
Internet
Literature
Menstruation
New Zealand
online communication
Organizational behavior
Poetry
Private Sector
Productivity
Public opinion
Social media
Studies
Women
Women's work
Workplaces
writing
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Summary:Inspired by Hélène Cixous's ‘The laugh of the Medusa’, this paper revisits a public uproar over menstruation in the workplace triggered by a statement from the CEO of New Zealand's largest body of private sector employers, that periods make women take more sick leave than men. The utterance triggered an astonishing outpouring of public discussion and writing about working while menstruating, as well as about productivity and equal pay. We discuss how a comment about women's periods ruptured the status quo of menstrual repression by using selected online posts rendered as poems. Then, drawing on Cixous and the idea of poetic rapture, we discuss women's online writing in tandem with feminist writing on menstruation. In our theoretical reflections we consider how poetry, menstruation and social media can ‘make trouble’ for regimes of power. We argue that menstruation should be a required topic for organizational studies.
ISSN:0968-6673
1468-0432
DOI:10.1111/gwao.12059