Cosmopolitan designated 2022 as “the year the period went public.” Indeed, many activists, artists, and scholars since then are critically investigating the influences of menstruation and bleeding in literature, culture, the arts, medicine, technology, and media, among others. New scholarship has brought attention to a critical investigation of wombs and periods. The publication of The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies (2020) further develops menstruation as a category of analysis within literary studies, the humanities, and academia as a whole. Not only this, but recent developments in life-writing studies highlights the ways in which bodies interact with the world. G. Thomas Couser's The Work of Life Writing (2021) investigates how memoirs portray the world and lived experiences in such a way that fiction and poetry are not able to articulate. In this sense, memoirs about menstruation and dysmenorrhea are at a focal point within literary studies that demonstrate why other genres about menstruation and the womb are not able to express an accurate lived reality of menstrual pain.

This panel includes four speakers who each research menstruation in life writing. Each panelist will speak for twelve minutes, which leaves the remaining time for discussion with the audience. We seek to investigate how life writing portrays menstruation and pain. Each panelist offers a unique perspective on the challenges that writing about menstruation brings to the memoir genre.

Ela Przybylo, one of the editors of The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies, will argue that there are ways in which writing in and with pain, and specifically menstrual pain, influences the process of creation. These explorations will be built on several key assertions: that recognizing and managing menstrual pain are central to menstrual justice, that language around menstruation must be ungendered, and that menstrual pain is fruitfully placed in dialogue with crip perspectives on pain.

Maria Ortiz will analyze non-fiction to explore the shame, physical and emotional toll, limitations caused by, and true havoc wreaked by having a uterus and periods. Using humor and sincerity, Ortiz will share excerpts from a book in progress that investigates periods, debilitating cramps, flows, and the final and eventual hysterectomy.

Camille Houle-Eichel will investigate the term dysmenorrhea, which is often used in life writing as an umbrella term to qualify any form of pelvic pain women deem ‘abnormal.’ The life writing Houle-Eichel examines is an attempt to steer away from the pathographies of singular experience and a work that seeks to break the cycle of isolation through the act of writing.

Maria Rovito will examine how authors of life writing use rage as a tool to enact change for people who menstruate. From Lara Parker's Vagina Problems, to Abby Norman's Ask Me About My Uterus, writers who live with menstrual pain use anger as a tool of advocacy to alter how the literary world views menstruation and pain.

Scholars of all literary texts, periods, and genres will have an interest in attending a panel on menstruation, dysmenorrhea, and life writing. Ranging from the literature in Medieval Studies on the gendered body, to the Victorian impetus to hide menstruation in fiction, to contemporary fiction's embracement of menstruation, scholars of all backgrounds will be interested in attending a panel on menstruation in life writing.

No other academic conference, session, or committee has hosted a panel in which all the speakers research and write about menstruation and dysmenorrhea from a literary perspective. This panel will fill an overlooked gap in literary studies, as well as respond to the MLA's Presidential Theme of Celebration: Joy and Sorrow. Menstruation and dysmenorrhea are particularly stigmatized in literature, academia, and western society as a whole. Periods and the womb are still seen as disgraceful topics within the realm of literary studies and higher education. This panel brings periods, the uterus, dysmenorrhea, and menstrual cycles to the forefront and asks participants to celebrate the womb with us.

We hope that the audience will leave this panel with a new understanding of how devastating menstrual pain can be, as well as explore why life writing is the preferred medium to investigate the body's relationship to the lived experience of dysmenorrhea. We are anticipating that the audience will engage with our discussions about menstruation, the joy and sorrow of owning a uterus, and the extraordinary abilities that life writing offers those who suffer from menstrual pain. We are hoping that the audience leaves with a newfound appreciation for scholars with endometriosis and using life writing to express the joy and sorrow of menstruation.