Through Period Positive and #periodpositive, founder Chella Quint, head of PSHE-turned-comedian-turned-menstruation education researcher and the creator of Adventures in Menstruating, creates, promotes and shares resources and recommendations for period positivity from her menstruation education research project and signposts other great resources for all ages and genders, menstruators and non-menstruators. She is supported by colleagues, volunteers, fans and friends.
She is the author of two new books:
Out now!
Out now in the UK! And in the US and Canada!
Chella coined the term ‘period positive’ in 2006 while touring her free Adventures in Menstruating comedy show and workshops in school holidays while teaching drama and PSHE. She kept meeting audiences who wanted her to speak at their school or university and share the concepts she was developing around period positivity more widely. Finally she went back to university, completed an MA in education, and started researching issues in menstruation education to find out how she could do more.
Chella developed Period Positive and devotes her time to promoting period positivity to counteract the frequently negative public discourse about menstruation. She accepts that people may both love and hate periods, but tries to unpick how big an influence the media plays in these attitudes. She aims for ‘period neutral’, using a positive approach.
From Chella:
The most compelling bits of my research findings are the impact of advertising messages on the fears kids – and adullts! – have reported about menstruation. Their concerns have been of shame, secrecy and leakage fear. There’s a history of language use and deliberate marketing in schools that demonstrates a clear link, and it all comes down to two things – secrecy-vs.-privacy, and shame. Privacy is fine – that’s a boundary you’re setting and it’s about safety, choice and consent. Secrecy, on the other hand, is not ok. Secrecy is someone else – whether that’s a parent, teacher, advertising message or society more generally – telling you that you need to be quiet about something – or that you need to do whatever it takes to make a part of you invisible. That’s no way to be, as anyone who experiences intersectional oppressions or whose gender identity, race or ethnicity, sexuality, or disability is not immediately apparent.
And that’s where shame comes in. No one has the right to imply that anyone’s identity, body, or bodily function (or dysfunction, for that matter) is shameful, makes people uncomfortable, or should be hidden or kept secret, and yet that is how menstruation education is most often approached (or avoided) in schools and even in policy. When organisations lack awareness of quality, origin and purpose of both formal and informal menstruation education currently on offer, there is a tacit complicity in the status quo, which Period Positive serves to challenge.