The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies, ed. by Chris Bobel, Inga T. Winkler, Breanne Fahs, Katie Ann Hasson, Elizabeth Arveda Kissling, Tomi-Ann Roberts

The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies, ed. by Chris Bobel, Inga T. Winkler, Breanne Fahs, Katie Ann Hasson, Elizabeth Arveda Kissling, Tomi-Ann Roberts. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, 1037 pp. Open Access E-book. 978–981–15–0614–7. This book is worthy of celebration for its mere existence. Menstruation, despite being an everyday phenomenon in the lives of half the world’s population, and of central importance to health, reproduction, gender equality and transgender equality, has barely been studied due to historical stigma and taboo. This handbook has been a major factor in bringing together the existing disparate research, shaping it into its own field, naming it Critical Menstruation Studies and making it available via Open Access. The quality of the research collected here matches up to its quantity – its 1037 pages contain 72 chapters, by over 130 researchers and writers, and include state-of-the-art work on the psychology, anthropology, public health, sociology and experience of menstruation. Menstrual knowledge here includes personal narratives, art and conversation as well as academic research, and particularly impressive chapters and artworks have been contributed by people who have experience of menstruating while homeless, in prison, trans, neurodiverse or disabled. Modern Linguists may regret the dominance of Anglocentric research, particularly focused on the US and Australia, with inclusion of activist work in the Global South, and the dearth of literary, historical or other humanities approaches. Simply swelling this volume to even more overwhelming proportions would have exceeded the limits of what can be printed, bound and read in a single book, however. Critical Menstruation Studies is clearly already beginning to burst at the seams. The handbook’s size might give the impression that everything has been said about menstruation, but the opposite is true. The chapters are not surveys, as is the case in other handbooks, but rather case studies that can be viewed as a kaleidoscope, rather than read back-to-back as a complete master narrative. The volume functions in this way not only as a culmination of years of work, but also as an invitation for further research. If you are going to publish a handbook, this is how to do it.