The Menstrual Imaginary in Literature

This book draws on literary, cultural, and critical examples forming a  menstrual imaginary —a body of work by women writers and poets that builds up a concept of women’s creativity in an effort to overturn menstrual prejudice. The text addresses key arbiters of the  menstrual imaginary  in a series of letters, including Sylvia Plath the initiator of ‘the blood jet’, Hélène Cixous the pioneer of a conceptual red ink and the volcanic unconscious, and Luce Irigaray the inaugurator of women’s artistic process relative to a vital flow of desire based in sexual difference. The text also undertakes provocative against-the-grain re-readings of the  Medusa , the  Sphinx ,  Little Red Riding Hood,  and  The Red Shoes,  as a means of affirmatively and poetically re-imagining a woman’s flow. Natalie Rose Dyer argues for re-envisioning menstrual bleeding and creativity in reaction and resistance to ongoing andproblematic societal views of menstruation.