Menstruating the Past, Consuming the Future: Analysing Sanitary Hygiene Products through the work of Walter Benjamin

Abstract

This thesis explores how the menstruating subject is articulated in contemporary consumer culture and through practices of consumption. This results in an alternate reading of the menstruating subject that brings together broader questions related to modernity and history. Consumption in modernity occupies a troubled place for feminist theorists and activists; considering consumption requires the rejection of assumptions about the consumer as a blank slate on which advertisers and marketers write their products. The assumed passivity of the young female consumer is also readily questioned, particularly in relation to sanitary hygiene products. Using the work of Walter Benjamin, particularly his ideas of „now-time‟, the dialectical image and technological reproducibility, allows for a different type of analysis of the menstruating subject in modernity. Understanding how the past, present and future are constructed in current sanitary hygiene product advertising and branding leads to new ways of accessing the everyday for young women in contemporary Australia. Benjamin‟s literary trope of the fragment is also discussed and used in conjunction with the cultural artefacts of everyday objects and commodities. Looking at the visual and digital media of two brands of sanitary hygiene products Moxie and U by Kotex, framed by an autoethnographic approach, I offer a way of considering menstruation and consumption together whilst also suggesting new possibilities for how we frame the everyday for young women in modernity.