Final Animation

Here is my final piece for my creative project, an animated info graphic on the recent news subject of the 'tampon tax'.

Reading: Underhill-Sem, Yvonne (2005) ‘Bodies in Places, Places in Bodies’ in Harcourt, Wendy and Escobar, Arturo Women and the Politics of Place

• “Some argue that feminism has drawn attention drawn attention to the body as a site of political contestation.”

• “The impetus to ensure gender equality at the global level is still pressing, especially given the craziness of the twenty-first century”

Reading: Taylor, Harriet and Mill, J. S. (1850) ‘Women’s Rights’ in Robson, Ann p. and Robson, John M. (ed) (1994) Sexual Equality

• “As each successive step [towards change] requires a whole generation or several generations to effect it, and is then only one step, things in reality very changeable remain a sufficient length of time without perceptible progress, to be, by the majority of cotemporaries, mistaken for things permanent and immovable”

• “A woman is born disqualified, and cannot by any exertion get rid of her disabilities.”

Reading: Taylor, Helen (1886) ‘Women and Criticism’ in Robson, Ann p. and Robson, John M. (ed) (1994) Sexual Equality ,

• “when anyone proposes to break in upon any established order whatever, by any plan which is actually intended to be carried into practical operation, then there arise a multitudinous host of objections, not from one side only but from every side”

Reading: Kissling, Elizabeth Arveda (2006) Capitalizing on the Curse: The Business of Menstruation

• “In spite of all the social, political and economic gains women made in the twentieth century, taboos still limit women’s activities and public communication about menstruation…menstruation is either an illness to be managed or a hygienic crisis to be cleaned up and hidden.”

• “Femcare ads have long emphasized the importance of secrecy; both menstruation and menstrual products must be concealed.”

• “One must keep menstruation concealed, to prevent one’s carefully constructed front of femininity from being damaged by the taint of menstrual pollution.”

• “”One of the obligations that women have in a culture that sexually objectifies their bodies is to conceal the biological functioning of their bodies” asserts Tomi-Ann Roberts (2004)”

• “Within the current cultural logic of late capitalism, a woman’s relationship to her menstrual cycle is largely defined through consumer products.”

• “The freedom (if not freshness) in women’s everyday lives enabled by modern menstrual products is truly transformative, but freedom is never really free, at least under consumer capitalism.”

Reading: Rome, Esther (1986) ‘Premenstrual Syndrome (PMS) Examined Through a Feminist Lense’ in Olesen, Virginia L. and Woods, Nancy Fugate Culture, Society and Menstruation,

• “The phrase I hear over and over again is “out of control”, the las thing a woman is brought up to be. She cannot live up to the image of herself as a good woman that she maintains through the rest of her cycle: that is, cheerful, complaint, easing everyone else’s social relations.”

Reading: Harlow, Sioban D (1986) ‘Function and Dysfunction: A Historical Critique of the Literature on Menstruation and Work’ in Olesen, Virginia L. and Woods, Nancy Fugate Culture, Society and Menstruation, Hemsphere Publishing Corporation

• “Historically, menstruation has often been cited as the source of women’s inferiority as workers. It has been argues that, given the physical and mental demands of menstruation, the performance of certain jobs might cause a woman to hurt herself or to disrupt the orderly and efficient production of goods. Despite the influence that this reasoning has had on women’s lives, the validity of its conclusions have never been demonstrated by scientific enquiry.”

• “during that period when the biology of menstruation was just beginning to be known… physical and mental weakness is inherently associated with the normal functioning of women’s reproductive organs.”