Blood Work: Menstrual Cycle Scholarship Comes of Age

It is an exciting time to be a scholar of menstruation. The public debate about menstruation has galvanised since 2015, through what lawyer Jennifer Weiss-Wolf defined as a ‘menstrual equity movement’, and social media has in recent years added to the debate through the #MenstruationMatters conversation, as well as Chella Quint’s #PeriodPositive campaign.1 Academic research has also kept up the pace. At the biannual Society for Menstrual Cycle Research conference in Colorado, June 2019, a record number of scholars from a wide range of disciplines shared and debated new research.2 The following three books will no doubt have formed part of the discussions, as their authors arguably contribute in various ways to the field of Critical Menstrual Studies—itself a term coined in forthcoming Palgrave MacMillan handbook of the same name.3