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Sex Roles (2013) 68:107120 DOI 10.1007/s11199-011-0092-4
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Normal and Natural, or Burdensome and Terrible? Women with Spinal Cord Injuries Discuss Ambivalenceabout Menstruation
Heather Dillaway & Katherine Cross &
Catherine Lysack & Janice Schwartz
Published online: 2 December 2011# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
Abstract Literature on womens reproductive health experiences after spinal cord injuries (SCI) documents a temporary period of amenorrhea after womens injuries. However, research is lacking on how women with SCI feel about amenorrhea or menstruation. That is, we do not know the meanings that women with permanent, physical disability ascribe to their experiences of simultaneously normal and abnormal reproductive processes. Prioritizing a feminist disability perspective and using interview data from a snowball sample of 20 women with SCI in Detroit, Michigan, in the United States, we outline how interviewees are ambivalent (yet also slightly negative) towards menstruation and amenorrhea within the context of their disability, and may be both different from and similar to able-bodied women in their attitudes and experiences as a result.
Keywords Menstruation . Amenorrhea . Spinal cord injuries . SCI . Disability. Attitudes . Interview
Introduction
Girls and women in the United States (U.S.) are faced with mixed messages about menstruation (Charlesworth 2001; Costos et al. 2002; Kissling 1996a; Kowalski and Chapple 2000; Stubbs 2008); however, negative meanings of menstruation remain prominent within dominant cultural messages. Attitudinal research from the U.S. and the United Kingdom (U.K.) illustrates that the meanings of menstruation vary considerably in different countries and cultures, and across different social locations (e.g., age, socioeconomic, religious, and racial-ethnic groups) within any one country or culture (Britton 1996; Brooks-Gunn and Ruble 1986; Costos et al. 2002; Kissling 1996a). Despite what we know generally about the effects of womens social locations on the meanings of menstruation, however, we have little research that explores diverse womens choices for managing or dealing with menstruation in the face of certain menstrual meanings. In addition, little research exists about the messages that girls and women in any country receive about amenorrhea (i.e., the absence of menstruation) and the meanings and experiences of this phenomenon. To begin to remedy these gaps in the literature, we use data from a small, in-depth interview study of 20 women with spinal cord injuries (SCI) in...