From mid-October to mid-November 2013, Australian performance artist Casey Jenkins sat for twenty-eight days in a gallery in Darwin, far North Australia, knitting a scarf from a ball of wool lodged in her vagina. The knitted wool was displayed on coat hangers suspended from the ceiling. Parts of the performance of Casting Off My Womb were filmed by the public broadcasting service SBS2, and aired in late November 2013 as a two-minute-and-forty-eight second video clip titled Vaginal Knitting.Footnote 1 The clip went viral on YouTube, with over seven million views as of March 2016, and received extensive media attention. Casting Off My Womb attracted global public interest because Jenkins continued to knit throughout the days of her period, weaving her menstrual blood into the artwork.
The clip elicited strong responses. While some people praised the work, many online spectators wrote vicious, derisive and personal attacks on Jenkins for displaying her menstrual blood in a public place. Some comments were insults intended to shame Jenkins by calling her names, such as ‘attention whore’. Many of the online spectators’ responses to Vaginal Knitting highlighted the affective impact of watching the performance. Hundreds of people described their responses in physical terms. For example, ‘Margo McClellan’ wrote, ‘my gut tells me to barf’; ‘Alex Munoz’ wrote, ‘I'm over here gagging’; and ‘Genevieve Ampaduh’ wrote, ‘Vaginal Knitting just made me feel very queasy’.Footnote 2 Jenkins was also criticized for her haircut, eyebrows, skin, home city (Melbourne) and knitting technique, and for the colour of her shirt and the lack of shame in her facial expression.Footnote 3 Above all, it was the menstrual blood that seemed to catalyse the strongest outrage and constitute the most challenging or provocative element of the performance. The attacks on Jenkins became so violent that SBS2 was compelled to disable the comments section of the YouTube video.Footnote 4 While the documentation of the performance is still accessible online, it comes with a warning that the so-called ‘explicit’ content may be offensive to viewers and is only available to users over the age of eighteen.Footnote 5
According to Jenkins, spectators who viewed the performance of Casting Off My Womb in the Darwin Visual Arts Association (DVAA) gallery had very different responses to those who watched the work online: ‘In the gallery setting, viewers responded with more circumspection and respect than they have in subsequent internet forums’.Footnote 6 She explains that during the performance she would sometimes speak to spectators, who were usually very curious about, and supportive of, what she was doing.Footnote 7 When the work was filmed by SBS2, turned into a bite-sized clip and circulated globally via YouTube, the work became alienating, threatening and disgusting to many viewers. Although the SBS2 documentary captured the meditative atmosphere of the live performance through its use of soft lighting and by adding a gentle, rhythmic soundtrack, the intense reactions of some online spectators might be accounted for by the fact that the work was condensed from twenty-eight days to less than three minutes. The compression of time in the mediated version of the work meant that the performance lacked the duration necessary to make the knitting and the blood ordinary, banal or, as Jenkins had hoped, ‘uneventful’ and ‘boring’.Footnote 8 The two versions of the work – the live and the mediated – thus generated very different aesthetics in their speed and duration, and in the relationship between spectators and performer.
The loss of intimacy and duration in the SBS2 version gave Casting Off My Womb an extensive global reach, which, while productive in achieving a much larger audience than first intended, was antithetical to what I will argue was its original aesthetic of ‘slow dramaturgy’, and its feminist politics. The concept of ‘slow dramaturgy’, as defined by performance scholars Peter Eckersall and Eddie Paterson, describes performances that manifest a political and ecological awareness based on similar principles to those of the ‘slow living’ movement.Footnote 9 While this article will consider how Casting Off My Womb might fit within that paradigm, it also takes the concept of the ‘slow’ further as an interpretive methodology in its own right.
The negative, knee-jerk reactions of many online spectators of the Vaginal Knitting video are common and even predictable responses on a video-sharing website such as YouTube, which is renowned for anonymous, uncensored postings of opinions and bullying or ‘trolling’. These dismissive ‘gut’ responses provoke the question: in what other ways can this performance be understood that are more reflective of its original aesthetic and political integrity? Here, I employ what Matthew Goulish calls ‘slow thinking’ as a means of registering the forceful effect of Jenkins's piece in more complex and nuanced ways that take into account the performance's incremental and sustained energy.Footnote 10 Goulish writes, ‘some things happen which one can only perceive with slow thinking’.Footnote 11 While provocative feminist and activist performances are often designed to have an immediate and arresting impact on spectators, Jenkins's work demands a more ponderous approach to its gradual or ‘slow’ aesthetic, and that expansive, deliberative attitude will guide my thinking here.
Staging menstrual blood
Menstrual blood has been used in performance and visual art practices for at least half a century. Feminist art in the 1970s in particular attempted to dispel myths about the way the vagina and vulva should look and function. Such art aimed to counteract taboos that normalize attitudes of revulsion and fear towards women's genitals, bodily fluids and biological cycles. More specifically, during the 1970s, feminist artists began to use menstrual blood as their medium with celebrated works including Judy Chicago's Red Flag (1971), a photolithograph that shows Chicago removing a bloodied tampon from her vagina; Leslie Labowitz-Starus's performance Menstruation Wait (1971), in which the artist discussed her psychological state with spectators while waiting for her period to come; Carolee Schneemann's Blood Work Diary (1972), which included five panels of tissues blotted with menstrual blood; Mako Idemitsu's What a Woman Made (1973), a black-and-white video showing a tampon swirling in a toilet bowl with the artist's voice-over commenting on the roles, responsibilities and expectations of women in Japanese society; and many others.Footnote 12
As such there is a transgenerational aspect to Jenkins's work that suggests a cyclical continuity between feminist performance practices over different periods of time. This history adds complexity to Jenkins's decision to stage her ‘period’ as a contemporary provocation. For other performances that foregrounded menstrual blood we may look in particular to Catherine Elwes's durational works Menstruation I (1979) and Menstruation II (1979). For the performance of Menstruation I, Elwes sat on a circular sheet dressed in white as she menstruated, drawing and writing with the blood. In Menstruation II Elwes sat in a glass compartment writing down questions posed by spectators and her responses to those questions in her menstrual blood.Footnote 13 But in terms of its central action, perhaps Casting Off My Womb most explicitly recalls Schneemann's canonical feminist work Interior Scroll (1975). In this performance, Schneemann stood in a gallery in East Hampton, New York, and pulled a long scroll from her vagina. She read a fictional text from the scroll that satirically compared essentializing ideas about women artists’ so-called ‘innate’ intuition and bodily processes to traditional associations of male ideas with order and rationality.Footnote 14 Archival photographs of Interior Scroll show Schneemann standing on a table and pulling the spiralling scroll out in front of her.
Casting Off My Womb is reminiscent of Interior Scroll in the way it stages the wool hanging from the artist's labia, creating what looks like an umbilical cord. There is, however, no baby attached to the other end of the cord; rather, the ‘offspring’ is the art object. In Jenkins's case, it is the rows of knitted wool; in Schneemann's, the ‘script’ for her performance. The way in which Jenkins uses the vagina, its fluids and the evocation of the umbilical cord suggests the inextricability of her reproductive capacity and her creative production as an artist. Whether or not this connection is meant ironically remains ambiguous.
Unlike Interior Scroll, Casting Off My Womb does not prioritize language. Instead, Jenkins performs the act of knitting a simple scarf throughout the month. While performance theorist Jeanie Forte describes the way in which Schneemann's vagina seems to be ‘reporting the sexism’, Jenkins lets the bodily fluids ‘speak’ for themselves.Footnote 15 She does not anthropomorphize her vagina in Casting Off My Womb. Yet the display of menstrual blood in a public place proved sufficiently communicative and provocative to mobilize a polarized reaction from the work's viewing public. The anger and repulsion expressed by many online spectators from across the world suggests that the 1970s feminist critique of patriarchal depictions of the vagina and menstrual blood as dirty and threatening continue to be pertinent today. While representations of the vagina are more readily available today than at any other period in history, particularly through the proliferation of pornography and its distribution via the Internet, the ways in which the vagina appears, or is expected to appear, are limited. The female genital area as it ‘naturally’ exists is commonly masked in Western culture by a surfeit of representations that present the vulva in a highly manicured state through Brazilian waxing (the removal of all or most of the pubic hair), labiaplasty (a popular form of plastic surgery that alters the shape and size of the labia), or even ‘vajazzling’ – adorning a woman's pubic area with diamantes, glitter or other decorative images. The proliferation of images showing predominantly neat, clipped and ‘clean’ representations of the adult vagina has meant that biological processes such as menstruation, and its associations with reproduction over erotic arousal, remain taboo or ‘unsexy’.
Casting the vulva
The prevailing representations of the vagina today, particularly those found online, might go some way to explaining the YouTube spectators’ reactions towards Vaginal Knitting. Though public responses to the mediated version of the work expressed revulsion and outrage, its staging in the gallery did not involve masochistic behaviour or ‘in-yer-face’ shock tactics.Footnote 16 In fact, Jenkins's mode of performance was restrained, anti-exhibitionist and meditative. For twenty-eight consecutive days, Jenkins sat in the DVAA for approximately five hours a day, taking toilet and lunch breaks. The space was softly lit and the only constant sound was the steady rhythm of the knitting needles.
Jenkins sat on a wooden chest wearing a white, crocheted T-shirt and was naked from the waist down. Beside her feet were two small bags filled with skeins of 100 per cent natural, undyed wool. She inserted one skein of wool into her vagina at a time and knitted until its completion (which would take several hours), at which point she would attach and insert the next skein. Her legs were slightly open, allowing the end of the yarn from which she was knitting to freely extend from her vagina. Unlike Interior Scroll, Jenkins's posture and placement on the chest did not draw attention to her vulva. Instead, the focal point in Casting Off My Womb was Jenkins's moving hands as they knitted.
Casey Jenkins performs Casting Off My Womb at the Darwin Visual Arts Association. Used with kind permission by the artist, Casey Jenkins.
Plain metal coat hangers were suspended from the ceiling at different heights in front of Jenkins. As the knitting progressed, the expanding scarf was hung in such a way as to show the ebbs and flows of the menstrual blood as it stained sections of the wool, giving the effect of a litmus test or a striped scarf. Mounted on the walls around Jenkins was Australian artist Greg Taylor's Cunts . . . and Other Conversations (2008–9), which included over 140 life-size sculptures of different women's vulvas. Cunts . . . and Other Conversations had previously been displayed at the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart, Tasmania. Taylor and Jenkins had decided to present the works together because of their shared interest in generating discussions around public perceptions of and attitudes towards women's bodies.Footnote 17
Throughout the performance of Casting Off My Womb, Jenkins maintained a calm and meditative demeanour as she focused on her knitting with careful attentiveness. She described the experience of the performance as ‘extremely relaxed’ due to the heat, humidity and slower pace of life in Darwin relative to other Australian cities, and also because of the opportunity to focus on a single task.Footnote 18 She noted that the effect of having the wool in her vagina was ‘confining, because I'm attached to this knitting’ and ‘slightly uncomfortable sometimes, arousing sometimes’.Footnote 19 When her period began it became difficult to knit because the wool was wet and thus harder to manipulate across the needles.Footnote 20 She had to store the skeins of wool in the fridge each night and the gallery was air-conditioned to stop the wool from absorbing too much moisture.Footnote 21
Knitting menstrual blood in Casting Off My Womb. Used with kind permission by the artist, Casey Jenkins.
One way to interpret the calm, meditative ambiance and intensified, if not heightened, phenomenological experience of Casting Off My Womb is with reference to what Eckersall and Paterson describe as ‘slow dramaturgy’, an account of the significance of time, pace and duration in contemporary performance works expressing a political and ecological consciousness. Drawing from the principles of the ‘slow food’ and ‘slow living’ environmental movements, they locate slow dramaturgy in performances that are attentive to the everyday, the banal, the local; to slowing down the speed of daily lives under the efficient and flexible flows of neoliberalism, its insatiable drives towards production and consumption; and to the affective experiences of live performance.Footnote 22 They write, ‘What we find is theatre that foregrounds ecologic–material dramaturgical intensities, which trend towards slowness, ambiance and connectivity. This, we suggest, can be considered slow dramaturgy’.Footnote 23
I suggest that Casting Off My Womb employs a slow dramaturgical aesthetic in its durational quality, the creation of a meditative ambiance and Jenkins's weaving of her bodily fluids into the knitted art object. A long history documenting the biopolitical effects of patriarchal structures on women's bodies makes the act of placing women's often maligned and concealed fluids in a gallery a political gesture. By displaying the slow bleed of her womb lining over several days, Jenkins intensifies a prosaic female bodily process and gives it a discrete aesthetic form. Casting Off My Womb uses the ‘slow’ time of the body's rhythms to bring out what Eckersall and Paterson describe, in a different context, as ‘the aesthetic and political potential of the everyday’.Footnote 24
The case studies that Eckersall and Paterson draw upon to illustrate the concept of ‘slow dramaturgy’ include four very different performances, none with explicitly feminist concerns. Yet their allusion to the political in the everyday is precisely what the feminist movement and feminist artists pioneered in their insistence that the ‘personal is political’. Jenkins's menstrual blood becomes political in a socio-economic context that promises instant gratification because the menses is a cyclical process that cannot be supplied upon demand. Its behaviour varies for each woman – sometimes it arrives at monthly intervals, sometimes it is an irregular occurrence, sometimes it stops altogether. In Casting Off My Womb, Jenkins thus stages a highly individual and personal process. This is different from her earlier performance and visual artworks that use knitted and crafted objects made in collaboration with other people for the purposes of political activism. Consideration of these earlier activist works provides a means to better understand Jenkins's decision to stage a durational act of knitting in Casting Off My Womb by situating the solo performance within a larger body of work that celebrates denigrated ‘women's work’ and connects pleasurable activities with gendered, political actions.
Political craft
Coined by Betsy Greer in 2003, the term ‘craftivism’ describes a politically motivated meeting of fabriculture and activism.Footnote 25 Examples include Canada's Revolutionary Knitting Circle, which promotes an anti-corporate, anti-globalist agenda by participating in marches, rallies, protests and ‘knit-ins’; and ‘Stitch ‘n’ Bitch’ groups launched by Debbie Stoller, the editor of pop feminist magazine Bust.Footnote 26 Jenkins co-founded the craftivist groups Craft Cartel in 2007 and Knit Your Revolt in 2013. As with the Stitch ‘n’ Bitch groups in America, Knit Your Revolt spawned offshoot groups all over Australia that connect using social-media sites such as Facebook and Instagram.
These activist craft groups comprise mostly female knitters who meet in bars and coffee shops where they create representations of politicized objects using crafted or handmade materials. These objects are used in peaceful protest against conservative political parties, policies and politicians, and to reclaim public space for social justice or artistic purposes. Craft Cartel was formed to protest against the re-election of the Australian government under Prime Minister Howard in 2007. Howard was internationally known for his neoliberal expansion of free markets and anti-asylum-seeker policies. Knit Your Revolt similarly created craft pieces that were used to protest against the right-wing Liberal Party policies introduced under Prime Minister Tony Abbott (PM from 2013 to 2015).
In particular, it was while Tony Abbott was leader of the Liberal Party (in opposition from 2009 to 2013, and as prime minister until 2015) that misogyny came to the fore in Australian public life. It featured both as a pervasive strain in political discourse and in the experiences of some women in jobs traditionally occupied by men. In 2012, it became a hotly debated topic when Australia's first female prime minister, Julia Gillard (PM from 2010 to 2013) accused Abbott of misogyny in Parliament. Gillard took aim at sexist comments made by Abbott, his party members and his supporters. One such slur occurred at a fund-raiser dinner for a Liberal candidate in Queensland where the menu offered a dish of ‘Julia Gillard Kentucky Fried Quail – Small Breasts, Huge Thighs & A Big Red Box’.Footnote 27 In this insult, ‘red box’ combines a reference to Gillard's red hair with a slang term for the vagina.
Gillard's speech included criticisms of Abbott's old-fashioned ideas about gender roles and women's place in the workforce. She quotes Abbott opening a statement by saying, ‘What the housewives of Australia need to understand as they do the ironing . . .’, and then responds, ‘Thank you for that painting of women's roles in modern Australia!’Footnote 28 She further criticized Abbott's inference that she was an unnatural woman because she was not married to her long-term partner and did not have children.
In 2013, after Abbott had been elected prime minister, Knit Your Revolt echoed Gillard's accusations by creating a banner that read ‘Misogynistic Knit-Wit Not PM Material’ in large colourful knitted letters. The banner was used in a performative protest that included a knitted caricature mask of Abbott's face and took place outside the Australian parliament. Such wordplay, puns, colour and humour are common features of the Knit Your Revolt aesthetic. This cute, non-aggressive and celebratory approach to activism invites spectators in on the joke and brings the group's performances and visual artworks frequent media interest and attention.
Craftivism more generally has led to the creation of new and playful terminology for protest actions, such as ‘yarn bombing’ or ‘knit graffiti’, where crafted objects are used in humorous and surprising ways in public space to draw attention to particular sociopolitical issues, often with an underlying gender concern.Footnote 29 Yarn bombing frequently involves knitting a colourful woollen skin over public landmarks or public facilities such as bike racks, benches or public telephones. One Craft Cartel project led to the construction of a large tent decorated in red and pink and shaped like a vulva, named the FemiNEST. The FemiNEST was created and curated by Craft Cartel and described on their Facebook page as ‘a travelling marquee for feminist & queer positive events, exhibitions, workshops, performances & shenanigans’.Footnote 30
Casey Jenkins and the Cunt Fling-Ups. Used with kind permission by the artist, Casey Jenkins.
In this way, the combination of collective and creative endeavours undertaken by these activist groups binds their political concerns to pleasurable community activities. Another Craft Cartel project engaged in a different mode of feminist street art activism through the creation of Cunt Fling-Ups: oversized sculptures of furry, colourful and sequinned vulvas, flung over power-lines in the manner of ‘shoefiti’ (when two shoes laced together are thrown over raised wires in the street).Footnote 31 The flamboyant, crafted sculptures of different vaginas were a satirical display of female genitalia. While cultural mythology has it that shoefiti is used to mark out gang territories or indicate the meeting point for a drug deal, the Cunt Fling-Ups attempt to reclaim parts of the public sphere where women often feel unsafe and unwelcome.Footnote 32 Craft Cartel's feminist intervention might be interpreted as an attempt to highlight the vulnerability of women in public places as targets of unwanted male attention, victims of rape and the sexualization and exploitation of women's bodies for the purposes of advertising.
In summary, both Craft Cartel and Knit Your Revolt recuperate traditionally denigrated and devalued domestic ‘women's work’ in their use of craft and knitting to make activist statements that restore value and power to such labour and its products. The domestic, handmade nature of the objects, costumes and banners of Knit Your Revolt and their use in political protests and not-for-profit activities are an attempt to recuperate traditional and seemingly anachronistic modes of production for non-violent ends. They further reject the market fetishization of handcrafted goods by refusing to sell the crafted works. Instead, the practice of making the crafts and the pieces themselves are used for community-building activities which the group devises in the name of the public good. The groups are formed on a local level for the purpose of pleasure as much as politics, a chance to share skills and connect with politicized women and like-minded individuals who enjoy knitting and crafting. The way in which the crafts are used suggest that the groups’ members are interested in how the banal and the everyday can speak to both local and national politics.
These notions of pleasure and deliberation are arguably absent in current, late capitalist labour conditions in the developed world, which operate on immaterial labour and flexible labour time. It is telling that these conditions are now commonly labelled the ‘feminization of labour’ to signify how labour and leisure time increasingly bleed into one another and how labour precarity is more prevalent in employment practices that previously offered greater stability.Footnote 33 Eckersall and Paterson note that the ‘slowness’ of slow dramaturgy refers not only to the temporal organization of a performance but, more importantly, to the haptic qualities associated with slowness – ‘pleasure, authenticity, connectedness, tranquillity and deliberation’.Footnote 34 Jenkins's work with crafted materials provides another example of how the performance of pleasure in the haptic and sensory domains can be understood as a riposte to the detrimental effect of neoliberal economic organization on women's welfare.
Furthermore, there is a sense in which the activities of the individuals in Craft Cartel and Knit Your Revolt who choose to meet week after week to collaborate creatively to make protest objects and discuss politics is as politically significant as the use of those objects at the political event, if not more so. The privileging of processes of collaboration and cooperation over end products is yet another means of rejecting the logic of neoliberal capitalism, its atomization of workers and communities and its emphasis on progress and the finished product.
Somewhat paradoxically, however, the works of Jenkins and her collectives are made within the context of a ‘feminized’ labour force by people who have sufficient ‘free time’ to ‘donate’, but are also an attempt to restore value to the unpaid labour time of work traditionally assigned to women. Although Jenkins's craftivist groups gather and work in public places, their slow labour is often not evident to most spectators, who only witness the end products and protest actions of the Craft Cartel and Knit Your Revolt collectives. Similar to the Vaginal Knitting clip, the slow dramaturgy of these collectives is concealed by the brief media coverage of protest events, which often reduces the groups’ work to a zany, media-friendly slogan created by eccentric activists.
The difference between the live and mediated forms of this kind of feminist and political activism poses a challenge: how do artists like Jenkins reconcile their desire both to exploit the unprecedented possibilities for distributing their work afforded by today's digital media culture and to maintain a connection to materiality, simplicity and the pleasures of the ‘slow’? Will slow dramaturgy always be subsumed by its fast mediatization? Can ‘slow thinking’ provide the necessary time for reflection to allow performances such as those of Jenkins and her cooperatives the opportunity to take on new or expanded meaning and complexity?
Conclusion: stitching it to the patriarchy
To conclude, I return to the title of Jenkins's performance, Casting Off My Womb, which anticipated public anxieties around the womb and vulva and placed a complex set of associations at the forefront of the work. Casting Off My Womb was less overtly playful and humorous than a work such as the Cunt Fling-Ups, but the performance's title evokes some of the irony of the Craft Cartel and Knit Your Revolt slogans. The act of ‘casting off’ in knitting involves taking the final row of stitches off the needle in such a way as to stop the wool from unravelling, and creates the edge of the knitted garment or object. The title of Jenkins's performance plays with the knitting term as well as the idea of ‘casting off’ in the sense of ‘getting rid of’ or unleashing a boat from its moorings. Further, ‘casting’ evokes moulding, an image that was reinforced by Taylor's porcelain sculptures hanging on the walls around Jenkins. Unlike Cunts . . . and Other Conversations, however, which presents an anatomically correct set of fixed representations, Jenkins suggests that the ‘cast’ of her womb is extensive, fluid and variable in form.
The title's suggestion that Jenkins is getting rid of her womb is ironic given her performance of intimacy, engagement, care and attention to the materiality of her womb's lining and the woollen yarn. Jenkins does not throw away what is produced but, rather, celebrates its potential to be made into something new and aesthetically pleasing. By ‘casting off’ the wool, Jenkins draws attention to the release of the womb's lining from being tethered to her uterus and its new conditions outside the body. Yet in this same act of ‘casting off’ the knitting, Jenkins secures the stitches and the contents of the womb attached to them, reining in and determining the shape and limits of her womb's lining as art object. Her title suggests that she anticipates a public desire to jettison or ‘cast out’ the womb or to ‘fix’ it as a safe and stable entity. Her slow knitting practice offers an alternative to such a rash act of discarding or dismissing the menstrual blood through her careful and deliberative engagement with it.
The works of Jenkins and her craftivist collectives are primarily concerned with exposing and satirically critiquing patriarchal biases. Jenkins's use of her body and its fluids positions her in a long line of feminist performance artists reclaiming agency over a site that men and masculinist systems have long sought to control and suppress. Although many of the online spectators’ responses dismissed Casting Off My Womb as ‘gross’, Jenkins's performance suggests a deeper complexity in the slow dramaturgy of the piece. Thinking Jenkins's solo and collective protest performances as ‘slow’, using ‘slow thinking’, provides a means to see the through-lines in her public protests over the exclusion of women from the public sphere, the value attributed to particular forms of labour and its embeddedness within gendered social and economic systems, anxieties over women's bodies and their reproductive capacities.
Her craftivist projects further suggest an artistic practice that is deeply attentive to the material, to rhythm, pace and focus that is at odds with the speed, precarity and flexibility of neoliberal production, industrialization and post-industrialization's immaterial economies and labour. Casting Off My Womb and the protest actions of Craft Cartel and Knit Your Revolt suggest an aesthetic that reconnects the sensory, economic and political, a provocative gesture within a system that often conceals the links between the personal and the political, the structural and the local.
Though Casting Off My Womb is a solo work, it is this connection between pleasure and the personal as political, evident in the craftivist projects of Craft Cartel and Knit Your Revolt, that Jenkins replicates and heightens in the performative context of the DVAA gallery. There is a correlation between the Cunt Fling-Ups and their desire to challenge the dominant perceptions, visibility and agency of women's bodies, and Casting Off My Womb’s provocation for the public to engage in discussion around the visibility of menstrual blood and attitudes towards women's bodies more generally. The ‘slow thinking’ of this article has shown that Jenkins's attention to non-utilitarian, creative production, reproduction and slowness in Casting Off My Womb can be powerful responses to the present conditions of gender inequality, labour precarity, insatiable consumption, immediate gratification and economic growth at all costs.
