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Although humans are one of the only species among mammals that menstruate, critical menstruation studies and vegan feminist studies alike have failed to examine intersections of species and sex in the context of period politics. There are a number of entanglements that would suggest the utility of advancing multispecies critical menstruation studies. Women, for one, have historically been animalized, and menstruation is often identified as a marker of women’s other-than-human status. Menstruation draws attention to the body, to base reproduction, to bleeding, to morality, to the ultimate animal being of humanity. It also serves as a powerful form of distinction that patriarchy has wielded in the disempowerment of women as a class.
Period shame has been one significant consequence for women and other menstruators, and a cultural silence on menstruation has manifested that persists even today in the 21st century. Bleeding, while a very prevalent experience for much of the population, is hidden away. This suppression, in turn, becomes vital in the maintenance of menstruating people’s diminished status.
Nonhuman Animals, meanwhile, are themselves deeply impacted by period culture. The disposable sanitary napkin and tampon industry, for instance, pollutes waterways and inundates landfills. Menopause supplements that are targeted at the pathologized post-menstrual woman, furthermore, are often loaded with ingredients extracted from or tested on exploited animals who suffer greatly. Finally, like menstruating people, the lived experiences of Nonhuman Animals are silenced, masked from everyday discourses to the effect of maintaining the anthropocentric systems that harm them. The currents of blood that pour into vivisection laboratories and slaughterhouses from billions of exsanguinated animals each year remain notably obfuscated. Bleeding, for menstruating people and animals alike, is hidden.
Feminists who have advocated period pride and a greater cultural acceptance of menstruation often do so by emphasizing women’s humanity and distinctiveness as a species. Indeed, menstruation can also be politicized to demonstrate women’s evolutionary superiority and their pivotal role in advancing human civilization. While this tactic is understandable given the longstanding systemic discrimination against animalized women, it is also the case that emphasizing women’s species superiority and distinction for other animals necessarily aggravates the lower and more vulnerable status of Nonhuman Animals.
Critical menstruation studies will need to overcome species stigma and engage with vegan studies that are better positioned to understand the politics of animality in the perpetuation of inequality. Likewise, vegan feminism, for its part, must overcome period shame and consider how bleeding is socially constructed in broader cultural contexts. My publication for the Journal of Feminist Theory takes a vegan feminist perspective and argues that destigmatizing and reclaiming animality will prove beneficial, even liberatory, for women and other menstruating people and Nonhuman Animals.
Dr. Wrenn is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Kent. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology with Colorado State University in 2016. She was awarded Exemplary Diversity Scholar, 2016 by the University of Michigan’s National Center for Institutional Diversity. She served as council member with the American Sociological Association’s Animals & Society section (2013-2016) and was elected Chair in 2018. She is the co-founder of the International Association of Vegan Sociologists. She serves as Book Review Editor to Society & Animals and is a member of the Research Advisory Council of The Vegan Society. She has contributed to the Human-Animal Studies Images and Cinema blogs for the Animals and Society Institute and has been published in several peer-reviewed academic journals including the Journal of Gender Studies, Environmental Values, Feminist Media Studies, Disability & Society, Food, Culture & Society, and Society & Animals. In July 2013, she founded the Vegan Feminist Network, an academic-activist project engaging intersectional social justice praxis.
She is the author of A Rational Approach to Animal Rights: Extensions in Abolitionist Theory (Palgrave MacMillan 2016), Piecemeal Protest: Animal Rights in the Age of Nonprofits (University of Michigan Press 2019), Animals in Irish Society: Interspecies Oppression and Vegan Liberation in Britain’s First Colony (State University of New York Press 2021), and Vegan Witchcraft: Contemporary Magical Practice and Multispecies Social Change (Routledge 2026).
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