Menstruation As a Social Construction Field: Analysis of Oppression and Struggle in Women’s Experiences

This study aims to examine the relationship between women’s experiences during menstruation and patriarchal capitalism. In this direction, it questions how women experience menstruation, which is a social construction area, the elements of pressure in these experiences, and whether women can (or cannot) struggle with this pressure. In this study, based on feminist methodology, in-depth interviews were conducted with twenty-one women. How menstruation, which is a biological process, has become a social and cultural construction for women, and what power relations it contains are analyzed based on the principles of feminist methodology. While menstruation was evaluated from a sociological and feminist perspective outside the field of medicine, women’s knowledge became the focus. Throughout the study, the relationship between women’s understanding and experience of menstruation and the patriarchal ideology and the capitalist system was established.