Bloody Frontier Politics: Menstrual Equity, Military Inclusion, and the Canadian Workplace

Abstract

With its roots in second-wave feminism and entrance into the limelight during the mid-2010s, the “menstrual equity movement” continues to garner global momentum through combined efforts of grassroots activism, academic research, and social media, which has resulted in legislative and policy (re)formation across many contexts, inclusive of public and private workplace sectors. Critical menstrual studies scholars (Bobel & Fahs, 2020) have raised concerns about how this movement and related policy and legal reforms have become narrowly synonymous with reducing economic barriers to accessing menstrual products, rather than transforming cultural attitudes surrounding menstruation altogether. Within Canada, grassroots activism for menstrual equity has led to legislative changes nationwide (Weiss-Wolf, 2017). As of December 2023, the Canadian federal government amended the Canada Labour Code (SOR/2023-78) to mandate the provision of free menstrual products to employees across all federally regulated workplaces as a means to ‘improve equity, reduce stigma, and create healthier, more inclusive workplaces.’ Yet while this legislative change appears to be progressively centering menstrual health as a matter of DEI workplace policy, it remains set against a larger historical backdrop of feminist inquiry that has and continues to explore tensions of menstrual products and hormonal contraceptives, which are used to conceal and suppress menstruation, as both technologies of control and empowerment. In light of these complexities, we argue that menstrual equity policy and related DEI discourse within militarized institutions, as federally regulated workplaces, function as mechanisms of soft coercion which discipline assigned female at birth (AFAB) soldiers into alignment with masculine ideals of the soldier-worker under the guise of “inclusion.” We examine how menstrual concealment and suppression technologies are made available to AFAB soldiers as military technological solutions for occupational health that simultaneously expand participation and reinforce cultural beliefs that menstruation is a logistical problem to be minimized and/or erased in service of operational readiness.