Tampon Art: Or, Everything You Didn't Know About Menstrual Aesthetics

This just *HAD* to be circulated immediately! I found this online museum of Menstrual Art via the Feministe blog. Kate Goldwater's pieces are actually quite moving, despite the fact that I'm very scared to look in a film container ever again. I mean, in the movie Quills, the Marquis de Sade is represented as using his own feces to create text: shit writing on the walls of his cell. If this representation is accurate (which it may very well not be, but who knows?), then the idea of using one's bodily fluids to create art has been around for a long time. And I personally know of a girl I went to school with in my M.A. program who, believing in the power of pheromones, sent her own body odor out into the world with the hopes of it attracting her biological mother. She used other women as satellites, and they were not to use deoderant, perfume, or lotion of any kind. Nothing that would deter from the adopted girl's pheromone-soaked swatches of clothing or fabric they would wear strapped underneath their armpits and in other pulse point areas. But I digress... Anyway, the point is that FGM (female genital mutilation) is a horrific violence to young girls, and any attention that can be drawn to it is energy well spent.

Be sure to check out the other artist listed on the left side of the online museum site...interesting stuff.