UC Santa Barbara

This thesis explores the history of Black menstruation through enslavement and its afterlives and posits Black menstruation as an erotic and autonomous project that resists the culture of disembodiment from the Black reproductive body. I argue that ancestral trauma has conditioned a disembodied relationship to the body as Black people with uteri must internalize and negotiate the deviancy white supremacy, nationhood, patriarchy, and capitalism projects onto Black reproduction. To demonstrate this ancestral trauma, I analyze menstruation in the Gold Coast prior to European colonization and during chattel slavery in the U.S to reveal how menstruation has undergirded efforts to surveil Black reproduction and disrupt kinship paradigms in African and American cultural landscapes. I shift to current representations of Black menstruation including Audre Lorde’s “My Mothers Mortar” essay and Michela Coel’s drama HBO series I May Destroy You, to unravel how menstruation can cultivate erotic autonomy and resist violent disembodiment as they foster intimacy with Black menstruators and their bodies. Overall, my thesis demonstrates how Black menstrual history connects narratives of menstruation from precolonial Gold Coast and the American plantation to the current plight of Black menstruators and offers what I call the bloody erotic as an intervention to disrupt racialized and gendered disembodiment.