PERIODS: Human Rights in the Menstrual Movement

PERIODS explores the promises, pitfalls, and renewed potential of human rights in the menstrual movement.

The project has two central objectives: first, to develop a thick and nuanced understanding of human rights in the menstrual movement, and second to generate empirical insights from a young, translocal, global South-driven movement for the reconceptualization of human rights based on social practice.

The period emoji, the year of the period, and an Oscar-winning documentary—menstruation is gaining attention at all levels. While research, policy, and practice on menstruation to date largely focus on tangible, material needs and risk leaving menstrual stigma and its role in perpetuating gender injustices intact, PERIODS recognizes that menstrual stigma and unmet menstrual needs have profound effects on the human rights to health, bodily integrity, education, work, and participation in social, cultural, and public life.

The project centers the social practice of human rights in the menstrual movement
by drawing on the articulations of lived experiences of people who menstruate and
perspectives of movement leaders.

It will examine if social movements reframe how human rights related to menstruation are understood and if so, how they move beyond the dominant reductionist framings in favor of a holistic, inclusive, and expansive conceptualization of human rights.

The project combines empirical research using in-depth interviews, focus groups, qualitative surveys, and document analysis with conceptual work grounded in human rights. Theoretically, the project is rooted in the critical engagement with human rights and a re-envisioning of human rights ‘from below’. It considers the practice of human rights in the menstrual movement as constitutive of what matters for the realization and conceptualization of human rights.

credits photo: by Vulvani www.vulvani.com