Pondering periods: Young women talk about menstruation in the age of menstrual suppression
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Seasonale, a birth control pill designed and marketed expressly to suppress menstruation, has been on the Canadian market since 2007 yet ‘menstruation by choice’ remains a controversial issue. This dissertation investigates menstrual suppression from the perspectives of experts in the field of women’s health and those of young women as a target group for this practice. It also explores the broader question of what everyday menstrual life looks like for young women in this time when menstruating seems to be on the wane. Utilizing a history of medicalization to contextualize the current state of affairs, this thesis draws upon insights from practice theory to map the nuances and complexities of menstruation and menstrual suppression using data from policy documents and focus group interviews. The parameters of the menstrual suppression debate are laid out as presented by the Society for Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada and their counterparts, the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research. In framing what they see as the key issues of concern, these experts reveal disparate underlying assumptions about the menstrual cycle itself, the technology of the birth control pill, women’s decision making, and what constitutes risk. The women’s views about menstrual suppression are far from straight forward, with risks associated with pregnancy detection, future fertility, and the pill’s interference with ‘nature’ on their list of concerns. They speak back to the experts, reconfiguring the parameters of the issue and revealing considerable skill in maneuvering the complexities of the choice-making terrain. In the everyday of young women’s lives, menstruation involves considerable work, not only during one’s period but also in terms of getting ready for it. In their talk about selecting a menstrual management product, participants draw upon interpretive frameworks to do with economics, the environment, health, hygiene, and growing up. In terms of managing menstrual bleeding they describe engaging in numerous routine practices in order to hide the evidence of their periods from both males and sometimes females in their lives. This work is compulsory, complicated and context-dependent, with some spheres of activity particularly revealing of high stakes consequences of failure. More broadly, they both reinforce and challenge notions of menstruating bodies as abject in male normative space, and balance attending to menstruation against erasing the fact of its existence as they describe their embodied menstrual routines.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".