Blanking and Erasure

The Period Panty and Intersectional Feminism

I began writing days ago. The days have passed; the time zones have changed. I am grounding myself in the thin air of Colorado altitude with everyone’s favorite cat and excessive amounts of ginger tea. This week, I drove towards the moon. I thought—tomorrow I will finish a syllabus. Tomorrow passed. I drove through a downpour. The moon disappeared, replaced by electrical surges. The gods must be fighting, I thought.

I began writing this newsletter a week and a half ago, I think—maybe two. This is a first—the slippage of time. I blame the period panties.

This week (whatever week that was now) I ordered period panties for the first time. Three pairs arrived, all the wrong size, and I thought how can I be this old and not know how to buy my own period panties? I cried before folding them back in the package, processing the return paperwork, and wallowing in my sadness, which might be a collective sadness over menstrual care and body dysmorphia. At 36 years old, I find myself suddenly loathing every period product option.

For a moment, I think of Pad Man, the glorious Bollywood biopic of Arunachalam Muruganantham, the guy who invented pad machines to help women in India open village pad factories for financial independence and accessible period products. I want to love pads like Pad Man does. I want them to feel as liberating as they become for bleeders in Indian villages. Perhaps in summer, it’s just too hot to love anything that isn’t covered in ice (or icing).

This morning (okay afternoon) I hobbled to the drugstore. It was 92 degrees and I’ve been nursing some heat exhaustion. I briefly couldn’t believe that I was a part of a culture that systematically struggles to care for menstruators. I couldn’t believe that years of work in menstrual activism could be thwarted by menstrual dysphoria. The complexities of taboo—sacred AND dangerous are more nuanced than I once imagined. At 12, I wanted a period like everyone else had. At 24 I still wanted a period like other people had—without the opioid prescription. At 36, I just want to like a period product.

On the road (a la Kerouac) I listened to Sarah Ahmed’s Feminist Killjoy Handbook. You know what I’m not into killing Joy. But I can get past that to get into all the things Ahmed is into—not taking the path of least resistant, becoming the squeaky wheel despite exhaustion, and likely, like her, giving up and walking away from a situation or institution when it no longer alights with my ethics or mission.

At the Dumbo CVS which never happens to be open when you need a Gatorade or Bandaid or toothpaste, I found a simple $18 pair of Thinx period panties. I can’t remember if Thinx is toxic, but I’m guessing they’re less toxic than arsenic-laced tampons. I was relieved to find the fit of the discomfort of period body dysmorphia and didn’t make me feel like I was sweating intensely in the early August heat. Then I bought a different brand at Whole Foods, and a bamboo brand online. And within three days, I became a period panty wearer. There was just one thing: I had no way of knowing I was on my period.

The padded lining of period panties is black (as far as I know in any brand I’ve investigated.). While I understand this from a laundry perspective, I couldn’t help feeling my period was erased from existence until I ran the padded cotton under the tap. Is the panty convenient, or is it a form of erasure?

Ahmed talks about the concept of “blanking” as a form of erasing the historical record and memory of black and brown women in feminist spaces. She sees white feminism as a form of blanking. A few weeks ago, I asked an AI generator to make a presentation about the suffrage movement. I was unsurprised by AI’s skill in blanking, providing me with a standard, upper-middle-class narrative of the white women who led the suffrage movement.

Each time Ahmed said blank on the audiobook, I thought, erased. I thought about how much I dislike erasure, except the erasure of government docs for cathartic poetics. I also thought about redaction and a strange off-broadway play, The Meeting: The Interpreter I saw a few weeks ago about the Trump Tower scandal. The play itself (I think) used disjointed movements to signal redaction in the court documents and interviews that later became the script. The disjointed dialogue, movement, and narrative created a space to fall through the cracks, too long for some narrative to grasp, to understand a purpose. After the show I thought—I haven’t felt this disjointed, this unscrambled, perhaps not even smart enough to watch a play, in a long time.

“Blanking can also be about a bond (they may feel they are bonded on the basis of shared womanhood'), which means blanking can also be a wall, noticeable to those who are missing. Some had to insist that they were women. We can think of Sojourner Truth, speaking as a Black woman and former slave, at the Women's Convention in Akron, Ohio, in 1851 saying, 'Ain't I a Woman?"' As Angela Davis notes, Truth in her speech referred to the strength of her own body, her labouring body, to challenge the 'weaker sex' arguments made against the suffragettes." Some had to insist that they were not women.” Ahmed writes. I think about the times I did not get my period and how the dysmorphia created a surreal state of unwellness—as if I could not locate my body in space or myself within it.

When I could not see blood on my period panties, I thought about the erasure of menstruation not just from discourse but from our own bodies. Not even left as a blue liquid interpretation in a commercial, but just an iron-scented damp pair of black panties. I cannot tell if the period panty works because it is comfortable and helps one meet the demands of 21st-century menstrual life (ie work hard play) or if it works because it erases menstrual blood.

I’ve been sitting on this newsletter too long. Much like a pair of period panties, it’s unclear how long because at the end of the day, they’re faintly wet and smell of iron. I should get it to you, on the internet, before my next period arrives (which should be soon, just in time for another erasure of blood).

So in light of blanking and intersectional feminism, here’s Kerry Washington giving my favorite rendition of “Ain’t I am Woman” which I know is formalized as a speech but, I also think of it as a poem.