Abstract
In this chapter, I ask what are the risks of the stories MHM tells about girls’ lives? I assert that MHM’s tendency to “spectacularize” the implications of what’s considered “poor” MHM is reflective of the Western imaginary of the “third world girl”—a flattened, overly simplified unitary subject that lacks agency. Intended to generate empathy and build cross-cultural support, MHM campaign discourse, through the use of this trope, may ironically further the distance between those in the Global North and Global South. I suggest that many of the stories of MHM are “feminist fables” following Cornwall et al. (2008)—representations that resonate with Western assumptions about life in the Global South, promulgate geopolitical hierarchies, and authorize “rescue” by well-meaning “saviors” in the shape of a narrow set of interventions. This, in short, is the problem with the problem frame advanced by advocates of MHM.
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- 1.
I am aware of at least one such device sold to the US market, a “modern bidet” that attaches to the standard toilet. Of note and underlining the linked feces-menstruation imaginary, the founder of this business also founded another business. It manufactures absorbent “period underwear.”
- 2.
Kony 2012 was an activist campaign organized by the NGO Invisible Children intended to bring unprecedented global visibility to notorious Ugandan militia leader Joseph Kony. Kony was known to abduct and force children to join his army. The centerpiece of the campaign was a short film that spread like digital wildfire and met vehement criticism for the way it promoted “feel good” activism yet failed to represent the nuanced history of the area’s conflict, and the conditions under which Kony and other warlords rose to power (see Finnegan 2013).
- 3.
Here, he is referring to Jeffrey Sachs, the celebrated development economist, and journalist Nicholas Kristof.
- 4.
Both references point to popular films featuring white protagonists living on the African continent.
- 5.
Readers might recall that Kristof’s eyes were opened to MHM in 2009 when he wrote about the pads/school connection in one of his regular New York Times op-eds. Kristof continued to write about MHM in his books, Half the Sky (2010) and A Path Appears (2015), the former, I must note, leads with a discussion of “The Girl Effect.” In 2015, he invited US menstrual activist Jennifer Weiss-Wolf to write the first of several essays focused on menstrual health and politics on his NYT blog “On the Ground.”
- 6.
Gupta explained to me the dual nature of his cloth donation initiative. The cloth used to make more than five million MY Pads has been sourced from urban masses who, through their donations, are made aware of the role that inadequate access to quality cloth plays in the menstrual struggles of women in far-flung villages.
- 7.
Gupta’s Goonj puts their money where their mouth is. Goonj has developed MY Pad to meet poor Indians’ cloth needs and improve upon, rather than change, traditional standards of menstrual care—by collecting cotton cloth; removing hardware such as hooks, snaps, or buttons; washing, sun drying, and ironing the cloth pieces; and cutting or ripping them to suitable sizes. Goonj stands alone in this way. While most other MHM projects create new products (either cloth or single-use pads or cups), MY Pad is more a labor-saving approach for a minimal cost (about 30 cents) than the introduction of something different. MY Pad is part of what Gupta calls “the three As of menstrual challenges: Access, Affordability, and Awareness”. Goonj also organizes extensive awareness meetings in remote villages alongside the distribution of MY Pads. Thus, when a woman or girl accesses MY Pads (which is a cloth bag of “my pads”), she already knows what to do; she does not have to be convinced to try a new method. Thus Goonj’s approach hews closely to its founding narrative: Make cloth use safer. In this way, it is laudable.
- 8.
UP refers to Uttar Pradesh, a state in northern India. It is the most densely populated state in the country.
- 9.
I pause to acknowledge that the concept of the “politics of rescue” was developed to examine allied (non)intervention into the Nazi Holocaust (Feingold 1970), but I liberally apply it here to elucidate development efforts that position NGOs and others as “saviors” and target populations as “victims.”
- 10.
Suttee or sati is the now-obsolete Hindu custom of a widow climbing on her dead husband’s funeral pyre to join him in death. It is a practice that shocked British colonists.
- 11.
And I am quite certain that his celebrity is due, in part, to his gender—the “surprising” fact that a man would devote his career to a “women’s issue.” Women have been innovating menstrual care solutions, too, but they have not captured the same attention. There is no Bollywood film about the team of women at Eco Femme, makers of sustainable menstrual care since 2010.
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Bobel, C. (2019). The Spectacle of the “Third World Girl” and the Politics of Rescue. In: The Managed Body. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89414-0_5
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