This article analyses three examples of online medical advice provided by UK based health websites on the topic of menstruation, and reflects on my artistic practice as a critical response to notions of menstrual normativity. The article considers to what extent these online platforms-now part of the cultural fabric of contemporary healthcare advice-sustain dominant Western cultural perceptions of menstruation. Through thematic and comparative analysis, the article explores how these texts reflect cultural discourses around menstruation through reinforcing cis and heteronormative standards, presenting menstruation as failed pregnancy, and as a largely problematic rather than positive experience. The article also reflects upon autobiographical and performative artworks as spaces developed alongside the analysis of the online medical advice texts, which propose and explore resistance to the social stigma still associated with menstruating.

Menstruation has a rich and growing body of academic literature, including on the use of language, the history of medicine, and cultural understandings. Since the 1970s, scholars have analyzed the visual impact of the marketing and branding of menstrual products, and its effects on menstrual shame. Artists have offered a different visual perspective, often utilizing menstrual blood directly. Recent scholarship about menstrual art has added to our understanding of shame about menstruation. In this entry we present and examine the key studies about menstruation in advertising, art, and other visual media, and situate this in a cultural, historical, and art historical context.

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