IT'S ABOUT BLOODY TIME AND SPACE.

• Author: Inniss, Lolita Buckner
• Position: Symposium Conference: Are You There Law? It's Me, Menstruation

Abstract

Time frames relationships of power, especially in the context of law. One of the clearest ways in which time is implicated in both law and society is via discourses about women's biological functions. This Article is an introduction to a larger project that analyzes legal discourses regarding a crucial aspect of women's calendrically-associated biological functions: women's menstrual periods. Over the course of the project, I explore legal discourses about menstruation through the notion of what literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin calls "chronotopes"--a connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships. Temporality, Bakhtin argues, is closely associated with certain paradigmatic spaces, and the combination of shapes, ideologies, and identities. Legal discussions of women's menstrual bleeding are key sites for the discursive creation and maintenance of certain ideologies of womanhood. These discussions appear in a wide variety of contexts and in ways that either explicitly reference or implicitly index ideologies of female identity. All are characterized by efforts to mark them as narratives linked to other temporally prior or future moments, and are often indices of chronologically or spatially related stigmas and taboos. While legal discourses of menstruation do not give a complete account of the category "woman," they provide cogent examples of how womanhood ideologies are constructed in legal contexts.

INTRODUCTION

One of the clearest ways in which time is implicated in both law and society is via discourses about women's biological functions. Especially crucial to women's roles in biological timekeeping is the process of menstruation. Because of its roughly monthly occurrence over multiple decades of a woman's life, menstruation is--to borrow a word from technology--a self-clocking process, one that is legible as a time-teller without the need for a separate clock signal or other source of synchronization. (1) Women across cultures have long talked about their menstrual cycles as "my time of the month," an expression that captures rather succinctly the personal and temporal nature of menstruation.

Despite the self-regulatory nature of women's menstrual periods, for centuries, girls and women have frequently been required to diary the beginnings and ends of their menstrual cycles, as if they could not take place without such external regulation. (2) This calendarization of menstruation is largely a method of feminine surveillance, one that ensures that girls and women can themselves control, or have others control, their abilities to reproduce. (3) Menarche, or the first onset of menstruation, is the start of the clock, for it is often seen as a sign of socially becoming a woman, of fertility, and of sexual availability. This is true notwithstanding the fact that being in the midst of menstruating is often deemed sexually unappealing and socially abhorrent.

Menstruation as a time-teller is perhaps not so unusual given that the human condition mandates that we are all up against the clock, moving towards the ultimate end: death. It is often said, however, that time governs women's lives differently than it does for men. This is captured in the centuries-old aphorism: "A man may work from sun to sun, but a woman's work is never done." This saying is frequently addressed, directly or indirectly, in literature on the concept of social reproduction--engagement in the activities required to maintain and recreate life, both on a daily basis and over generations. (4) Social reproduction is often gendered, as women undertake much of the labor needed to ensure its occurrence. (5) The notion of women's unending work relates to the notion of both time and space. The man envisioned in this folk saying leaves home, a space of respite, journeys into the world of toil, and at the end of the day returns to claim his well-earned rest. In contrast, the ideal woman of this saying is ever ensconced within the home. At home, the ideal woman works without ceasing, often laboring under the belief that she (and all that she stands for) would cease without her work. This hypothetical woman is an artifact of the cultural structuring of gendered labor roles, but she is not only from days of yore. The COVID-19 crisis has brought heightened attention to how even contemporary women who work full time jobs outside the home have faced immense pressure to perform their work inside the home along with those outside jobs. During this crisis, some women's outside jobs have, without much notice, migrated into the home with them, complicating and enlarging the already endless list of household duties that many women shoulder. Notwithstanding contemporary ideas about the usefulness of gender, or gender binaries, it remains the case that time is a device of its very own for women, or women-identifying people. There is a "women's time," and it is "cyclical, natural, task-oriented, relational, and embedded." (6)

Women are thus both temporal and atemporal agents, acting as biological timekeepers via the presence and absence of the biological imperative of menstruation, and yet acting outside of standard formulations of time because of certain social and cultural norms. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the extent to which women characterize their own social, legal, and political progress is itself often related to time and space. This may be an effort to harness the power of chronological assessments, and ultimately of historical judgments, in ways that have often eluded women as a class. To have one's actions fixed in time is to have one's spatial presence acknowledged. This is seen in how eras of feminism have been described in chronological "waves." (7) Whether and how these waves have operated and served women is part of a question-begging generation gap in feminism. One aspect of the larger feminist program, assuming for a moment that there is any one single program, is thus for women to lay claim to time and to their own space within time. But in order for women to do that, there must be a broader acknowledgement of the workings of legal and social time-space dynamics in relation to women's bodies. Women's menstrual bleeding is a key site for querying time, space, and the time-space continuum, which has particular importance in legal contexts. (8)

This Article is an introduction to a larger project that analyzes legal discourses regarding crucial aspects of women's calendrically-associated biological functions: the start, conduct, and end of women's menstrual periods. The project explores legal discourses about menstruation through the notion of what literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin calls "chronotopes"--a connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships. (9) Temporality, Bakhtin argues, is associated with certain paradigmatic spaces. The central claim of this Article is that discussions of women's menstrual bleeding in legal contexts are important aspects of the discursive creation and maintenance of certain time- and space-related ideologies of womanhood. After this introduction, the Article proceeds by briefly addressing the meaning and nature of discussions of blood in socio-legal discourse and especially of menstruation is such contexts. Next, the Article offers a personal narrative that helps to explore one common focus on menstruation seen in legal cases: discourses about child sexual abuse. The Article then explains the use of chronotopes in the context of legal discourse. It concludes...