Period – Taking the dialogue forward

Period
Taking the
Dialogue
Forward

Rosemaria Regy Mathew, S Balasundari

Forty years ago, I wrote a piece called ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ Where I celebrated a teenage woman’s use of menstruation as a means of communicating resistance to patriarchy. She waited four days to menstruate to show that she was not hanging herself for the sake of one man and a pregnancy but rather because she could not confront the task of killing as part of the armed struggle against imperialism.

A highly educated woman in the family could not read her communication. And therefore I said, enraged, the subaltern cannot speak. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in the foreword.