Introduction

This article sets the Period Products (Free Provision) (Scotland) Act 2021 (Scottish Parliament 2021) Act in the context of historical imaginations both of menstruation and of the nation. The Act is the first in the world to make free access to period products such as tampons, pads and reusable menstrual cups a universal right regardless of gender, socioeconomic or educational status, or any other marker of identity except for residency in the country.¹ This is an innovative, welcome step as it allows cis women and girls, trans men and boys, non-binary and genderqueer people and others who menstruate greater participation in education, work and in the public sphere, unhindered by the cost and inaccessibility of period products. Following campaigns from diverse groups such as Women for Independence, On the Ball, Girlguiding Scotland, the Scottish Youth Parliament, and through pioneering schemes by several councils, colleges, schools and foodbanks, the Period Products Act (as it is known for short) was introduced in April 2019 as a member’s bill by Monica Lennon, a Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) for Central Scotland, and was passed into law in January 2021.²

While the Act’s pioneering, progressive role has been emphasised in political debates and in the media, this article will show that the Act and the surrounding discussion also continues two deeply ingrained historical patterns of thought. The first imagines menstrual bleeding as a stigmatised bodily secret that needs to be hidden from the public sphere despite the politicians’ intention to tackle just this stigma, as they state in the debates of the Act analysed below. The stigma’s unintended persistence means that discourse about menstruation is usually restricted to talking about other people’s menstruation. Such discussion can create bonds and privilege for the speakers, and allows them to distance themselves from their own embarrassing bodies, as I will go on to show. This conceptual pattern is important because it means that despite the Act’s aim to tackle menstrual stigma, its very premise keeps menstrual stigma in place. It is based on the idea that menstruating without products is undignified and that transcending embodiment is positive.³ I will suggest that this pattern can be found in the public discussions surrounding the bill, specifically in the two-hour debate in the Scottish Parliament on the general principles of the bill (Scottish Parliament, 25 February 2020). As I will show in the first section of my article, ‘Shameful Menstruation and Bonding Menstrual Discourse’, the parliamentary debate repeatedly reveals the following underlying assumptions about menstruation: (1) that menstruating is a stigma; (2) that menstruators are always the ‘others’; and (3) that menstruation particularly affects those in already marginalised groups. In addition, speaking about menstruation (4) creates a privileged, pioneering position for the speakers; and (5) creates bonds between them. I will give examples of these patterns’ historical precursors in premodern and early modern humoral medicine and in modern fiction. Pseudo-Albertus Magnus’ medical text Secreta mulierum (c. 1300), the most important source for early conceptions of menstruation in the so-called Global North, which also circulated in Scotland, serves as an example of how old and long-lasting these five linked aspects of menstrual discourse are.⁴ I will also analyse two works of fiction that were directly mentioned in Scottish parliamentary debates, to illustrate the wide reach of the same five patterns in twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture: Ken Loach’s film I, Daniel Blake (2016) and Alasdair Gray’s novel Poor Things (1992).

The second, related historical pattern of thought that recurs in the context of the Period Products Act is imagining the nation as a collective body which is united by a shared blood and which, at the same time, transcends blood, specifically menstrual blood (Anidjar, 2014). A nation is often imagined as a large ethnic group of people related by blood and prepared to shed blood to defend the nation against others. In the second section of this article, ‘The Nation as United by and Transcending Blood in Scottish Thought’, I will show how persistently Scottish historical and political texts have imagined the Scottish nation in relation to blood from the Middle Ages to the recent past. I have selected examples from some of the most important sources for medieval and early modern Scottish history and self-understanding, namely Androw of Wintoun’s and John of Fordun’s medieval chronicles of Scotland, the popular epic poem Wallace, the famous ‘Canadian Boat Song’ and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, as well as directly from nineteenth- and twentieth-century political pamphlets and publications.

In the recent political discussions of period poverty, this conception of the Scottish nation as held together by blood has been extended to menstrual blood, as I shall argue in the third section of this article, ‘The Nation as United by and Transcending Menstrual Blood in the Period Products Act Debates’. Menstrual fluid is commonly perceived as blood, though strictly speaking it also contains cells from the uterine lining and vaginal fluids. I will show how traditional imaginations of menstruation and of the nation come together in the parliamentary discussion of the Period Products Act. The parliamentarians describe the community created by publicly speaking about the taboo topic of menstruation as extending to the whole nation. They cast Scotland as freely sharing not menstrual blood itself but discourse about menstruation, as well as freely sharing period products aimed at hiding this blood. In this way, they envisage a nation held together not directly by blood but by products designed for dealing with this blood, and through discourse about them. Understanding this pattern of thought is important because it provides an example of the wider intellectual significance of menstruation in a wide range of seemingly unrelated areas. When we begin to take menstruation seriously, it turns out to be at the centre of political, historical and social conceptions of citizenship. Despite tackling an issue that might seem marginal to some, the Period Products Act is situated at the heart of Scottish politics with its current campaign to create a nation state independent from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Scotland held an independence referendum in 2014, in which 55.3% of the electorate voted against Scotland becoming an independent country. The ruling Scottish National Party, which has been in government since 2007 and whose major stated political aim is independence, has continued to campaign for a second referendum during the Period Poverty Act’s progress through parliamentary committees. I will demonstrate to what extent such redefinitions of the position of Scotland as a nation within the wider United Kingdom are negotiated through menstrual blood in the parliamentary debate.

My method relies primarily on textual analysis, a technique developed in literary studies to examine and describe the nuanced use of language in fictional texts, often to reveal underlying cultural assumptions of which the speakers or writers may or may not have been aware. It can entail attention to linguistic details such as stylistic, rhetorical and discursive strategies used in finely crafted language (e. g., Herman, 2007). I use textual analysis not only on fictional but on medical and political texts and language. I also view the period poverty debates from a long and deep historical perspective. This allows me to observe the unintended continuities of historical stigma and hierarchies between those who menstruate and those who share knowledge about menstruation in the current debates. While I limit myself to texts and works that were produced or circulated in Scotland for the purposes of this article, much of the thought and writing about menstruation is transnational and part of a shared conception of menstruation in the Global North and beyond. My position is that of a cis woman who menstruates and who is resident in Scotland. I am a member of the Menstruation Research Network, one of the signatories in support of the Period Products bill, but we have not been directly involved in campaigning for this law. Despite the stylistic issues this causes, I sometimes use first-person pronouns (‘I’, ‘we’) to refer to those of us who menstruate so as to counteract the academic and public tendency to distance ourselves from our own menstruation, which I will discuss in more detail below.

I. Shameful Menstruation and Bonding Menstrual Discourse

This first section shows that menstruation is often treated as a subject of knowledge about which a privileged group can exchange information while distancing itself from the stigmatised experience of menstruation. I will illustrate this first through the two parliamentary debates of the Period Products Act, secondly through medieval and early modern medical conceptions of menstruation, and finally through depictions of period poverty and menstruation in modern fiction.

II. The Nation as United by and Transcending Blood in Scottish Thought

Introduction. Not only the Scottish parliament, but also the Scottish nation as a whole is presented in the Period Products Act’s debate as being united by freely shared discourse around menstruation, and the freely accessible period products. This creates an open public sphere with reference to menstruation, but simultaneously excludes visible menstrual blood itself. This pattern stands in a long tradition not only of speaking about menstruation, but also of defining the nation in relation to blood and at the same time as transcending blood.

The nation— including the Scottish nation— is often imagined as a social body (Cheah, 2003; Engström, 2018; Poovey, 1995) that historically had been held together by blood (Anidjar, 2018; Caverero, 2002), united as a large ethnic group by the blood of kinship (originally at least in part maternal menstrual blood), and by sacrificing its own and shedding its enemies’ blood in defence of the nation. At the same time, as political theorist Gil Anidjar observes, modern nations are often imagined as transcending blood, relegating the community of tribalism and bloodshed to the past and to the realm of metaphor:

Blood figures that which … politics transcends, manages, or excludes; what it should, at any rate, exclude: the archaism of blood feuds, the threat of cruel and unusual punishment—or of menstruation—and the pertinacity of kinship, of tribalism, and finally of race.¹⁶

According to Anidjar, modern politics distances itself from blood in several ways: from bloodshed that is or should be a thing of the past, as well as from the use of physical violence or death as a state-sanctioned penalty, from the racist definition of a nation as based on descent, and from menstruation. Anidjar does not elaborate on the latter, but the Period Products Act illustrates his point.

Anidjar constructs a historical timeline where premodern communities saw themselves as united by blood, and modern communities perceive themselves as transcending blood. In his account, the medieval church provided the model for a community held together by blood. Modern nation states followed this model, but distanced themselves from actual blood and instead defined themselves through a circulation of money, commerce and political discourse: ‘where blood was, there politics shall be’ (Anidjar, 2018: 27). However, he also points out that this timeline is not absolute: ideas of a union through blood are still found in modern imaginations of communities, and distancing from blood is already found in medieval ones. The premodern community of the Church was already configured by theologians as held together by the blood of Christ, but at the same time excluding blood when it prohibited its clergy from contact with any other blood (Bildhauer, 2016: 133–64).

The Scottish nation historically defined and continues to define itself through blood, as well as through transcending it, in three ways: (1) as sharing the same unifying blood in an extended kinship group; (2) as a ‘social body’ held together by the circulation of blood as a metaphor for money; (3) as having achieved its external borders and national sovereignty through bloodshed against its enemies.¹⁷ I will illustrate these three ways of conceptualising the Scottish nation through blood in the following with representative examples from fifteenth- to twentieth-century Scottish politics and culture. The examples have been selected because they are either historically significant and influential (Androw of Wintoun, Wallace, John of Fordun, ‘Canadian Boat Song’, Adam Smith), or come directly from political pamphlets and publications (Shaw, Erskine, Napier, McIntosh, Begg). The final part of this article will then describe the variations of these patterns in the Period Products Act’s debate. The Act in this way becomes visible as another way of configuring the Scottish nation as united by but also overcoming (menstrual) blood by creating a free circulation of period products, and of discourse about menstruation, which at the same time keeps the public sphere free from menstrual blood.

(1) Shared (menstrual) blood as creating a unified nation. Scottish political and literary writers have long and often imagined Scotland as a collective suffused by a shared blood. The well-known anonymous song ‘Canadian Boat Song’ (first attested in 1829), whose chorus is engraved into the Canongate wall of the Scottish Parliament Building, expresses Scottish national identity in relation to blood from the perspective of Scottish emigrants to Canada:

From the lone sheiling of the misty island
Mountains divide us, and the waste of seas –
Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland,
And we in dreams behold the Hebrides. (Scottish Parliament n.d.)

In this complex image, Scotland is imagined from a distance as the landscape of the Highlands and Islands that poetically merges with the blood, heart and body of the collective ‘we’ of the speakers or singers. Blood somehow overcomes the ‘division’ caused by the mountains and the sea between ‘us’ (presumably Scots in Canada) and the Scottish landscape, and creates a community of blood across the physical distance. The strength ascribed to the blood, presumably that of the community of Scots in Canada, might refer to the strength of yearning for Scotland. This community only has one shared ‘heart’, which moreover, is not in the Highlands, but is identical with ‘Highland’: the individual heart is indistinguishable from the landscape as well as from the heart of the collective ‘we’; individual, community and territory share one body and heart held together by blood.

The idea that the Scottish nation and other nations each have the same blood is spelled out more clearly already in Androw of Wyntoun’s Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland (Original Chronicle of Scotland), written around 1420. This historical chronicle mentions ‘Scottish blood’ (Scottys blude) and ‘British blood’ (Brettis blud; Wyntoun, 1872–9: Book VII, Ch. 4, l. 407; Book V, Ch. 12, l. 4242). Blind Harry’s Scottish epic poem Wallace (c. 1475) also speaks of ‘English blood’ (Sothroun/Sothroune blude, Ingliss blude; Blind Harry, 2003: Book II, l. 10; Book III, l. 386; Book IV, l. 297). Blood is here referenced as something that has a nationality, and similar phrases are still common as a shorthand for national identity, often ethnically defined.

This understanding of a nation as sharing the same blood has historically been linked to thinking of the nation as an extended group of blood relatives. The term ‘blood relatives’ (Latin consanguinis) was and still is used for kinship groups across Europe, including Scotland. The idea that a family shares the same blood is attested, for example, in John of Fordun’s Chronica Gentis Scotorum (Chronicle of the Scottish Nation), written in Scotland around 1365–85, which uses ‘nearness in blood’ (Latin sanguinis proximitas) as a shorthand for a close family relationship.¹⁸ This idea of blood kinship goes back to humoral medicine, where the blood that was shared between relatives was often believed to be more precisely menstrual blood from which the foetus was created.¹⁹ Though the connotation of blood relations with menstrual blood has faded from public consciousness, and science now considers family traits to be shared through DNA rather than blood, the idea of blood as creating family bonds still survives in common metaphors and phrases.

The idea of a ‘Scottish blood’, a national community based on common descent irrespective of geographical location, also continued, not only obliquely as in the ‘Canadian Boat Song’, but also, for example, in a pamphlet published by the Scottish National Party in 1964, which mentions such ‘Scottish blood’ in the context of the Tartan: ‘The Tartan is … the symbol of an ancient, revered and most democratic state or clan family society, linking those of Scottish blood the world over’ (McIntosh 1964: 40). Blood is here still understood as holding the nation together like a large kinship group.

(2) The nation as held together by blood as a metaphor for money. Blood is also often used as a metaphor to discuss another substance or phenomenon that holds together the nation, such as money. In An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), the Scottish political and economic thinker Adam Smith used the free circulation of blood as a metaphor for the free circulation of commerce. This is in the context of a disturbance of that circulation through what Smith sees as an overreliance of Britain on trade with its colony America, a trade which he describes as a ‘blood-vessel, which has been artificially swelled beyond its natural dimensions’ (Smith, 1993: Book IV, Chapter VII, Part III, 353). In the ‘body politick’ of Great Britain, referred to by the female pronoun ‘she’, the blood stands for ‘industry and commerce’ (Smith, 1993: 352). Blood in this way figures as a metaphor for that which should suffuse the nation imagined as a large human body. On the one hand, this perpetuates the idea of the nation being held together by circulating blood like an individual body, on the other it transcends blood, which is here a mere metaphor, while what actually circulates is industry and commerce.

This understanding of the nation state as freely circulating money and trade as if it was blood was hugely influential in modern political thought, and filtered down into public consciousness.²⁰ Blood is similarly invoked as something that used to hold the nation together through shared kinship, but that should in a modern nation be replaced with money, for example, in early nationalist activist Ruaraidh Erskine’s book Changing Scotland (1931). Erskine imagines a modern Scotland in which syndics would replace the ‘tribal’ Celtic communities, and people would be united not by blood, but through their role in circulating wealth:

in the modern Celtic state therefore there would be, not tribes united to one another by blood as formerly, but groups or syndics arising out of industry, but determined in this case to government … the grand object of the Celtic State would be to diffuse Money. (Erskine, 1931: 63)

Tribalism based on blood is here relegated to the past, though its structures are mimicked by the regional syndics aimed at circulating wealth. A self-published pamphlet probably dating from 1957 similarly uses blood as a metaphor for money infusing the body politic in the context of Scottish financial contributions to British revenue: ‘How long can our modest population afford to make free gifts of that magnitude and at what point will the continual blood-letting lead to the complete collapse of the patient?’ (Shaw, 1957 (?): 8). Blood here stands for money, and for something on which the medicalised Scottish national body (‘the patient’) depends for survival. This both continues to invoke blood as essential to the nation, and replaces it with money.

(3) The nation as defining its external borders through bloodshed. Scotland was and is also often imagined as having to shed blood to defend its outer boundaries against the English, and having to shed blood on behalf of the United Kingdom. The Wallace poem mentions English blood only in the context of Scots shedding it in battle. An 1896 pamphlet similarly refers to the bloodshed of war necessary on behalf of the feminised nation against England: ‘Scotland had up to this time [the beginning of the eighteenth century] retained her independence, although the blood of hundreds of thousands of her sons had been shed in defence of liberty’ (Napier, 1896: 5). Scotland is here cast as the victim of English attempts at colonisation or conquest that it historically resisted through sacrificing Scottish men’s lives, rather than as an active part of the colonial Empire that profited from slavery. As with the blood of kinship, the blood of battle is here also invoked only to relegate it to the past. James Begg in a nationalist pamphlet similarly mentions bloodshed as a solution to English attempts at treating Scotland as yet another province, but again locating it in the past: ‘Our wiser ancestors, we believe, would have shed the last drop of their blood rather than have submitted to such national degradation’ (Begg, 1871: 3). Supporters of Scottish separation still simultaneously describe bloodshed as a past means for independence from England, and emphasise that they have achieved the devolution of many powers of the UK parliament to the Scottish parliament without violence (e.g., Crawford, 2014: 12, 11).

III. The Nation as United by and Transcending Menstrual Blood in the Period Products Act Debates

Introduction. The Period Products Act’s treatment of menstruation can be seen as the latest iteration of this thought pattern defining the nation as both united by blood and as transcending it. As mentioned, menstrual fluid is usually read simply as blood. The legislation constitutes a public sphere held together by the circulation not of blood, but of the period products that allow the blood to be kept hidden, and of the discourse about menstrual blood. The nation’s external borders are particularly contested, and negotiated through the sphere in which period products circulate. The need to redefine the unity and borders of Scotland arises in the context of the United Kingdom’s external borders to the EU being renegotiated due to Brexit (in effect from 2020), and of the ongoing campaign championed by the Scottish National Party to secure another independence referendum for Scotland.²¹

(1) Shared menstrual discourse creates a unified nation. In the parliamentary debates, the bonds between speakers constructed by talking about menstruation were extended not just to parliament, but to Scotland as a whole. Findlay with some justification (cf. McKay, 2021) made explicit that not only parliament had begun to speak openly about menstruation, but also the media and wider public: ‘One thing that the bill has done is break down the barrier of our inability to discuss such serious issues about our health and wellbeing in the media or in public without embarrassment, reticence and discomfort.’ The whole country is here imagined as a united ‘we’ group that partakes in the collective privileging and bonding experience of discussing menstruation without barriers. It is unified not so much by directly sharing blood, but by transcending blood and circulating discourse about menstrual blood instead.

(2) Shared access to period products creates a unified nation. Access to period products, not just to the discourse about them, is also believed to bring forth a privileged unified nation. Menstrual products in the parliamentary debates were imagined as suffusing the nation and circulating in the same way as blood or commerce in earlier imaginations of Scotland. A core principle of the bill, referenced many times in the debate, is universal access: the availability of the products to everyone without having to prove financial or other need. While primarily introduced as a more practical and less stigmatising alternative to a voucher scheme or other targeted or means-tested approaches, the principle of universal access has the side effect of the population being treated as a unified whole, not divided by economic status, gender or other categories. Menstruators are not envisaged as individuals, but as a group. The key word used was ‘access’ to period products, rather than, for example, circulation or distribution, putting the emphasis not on those providing the products, but on the recipients imagined as a group. This access to products was believed to give the users at the same time access to the public sphere, in Johnston’s words, ‘access to education, work, sport and so much more’, thereby creating a more unified public. The access to products was also often specified to be ‘free’ or ‘barrier-free’. While ‘free’ in this context primarily means without cost, it also carries connotations of freedom and free movement for the collective who can access these products.

The idea of ‘barrier-free’ access mirrors the parliamentarians’ frequent claims that they are breaking down barriers in menstrual discourse, and thus again emphasises not only the emerging united collective, but also the barrier- and taboo-breaking nature of the legislation. The whole nation is imagined as partaking in the privileged position that not only the menstrual discourse, but also the menstrual legislation, creates. Campbell, like several other MSPs, repeatedly referred to the pioneering position of ‘Scotland’, not just of the Scottish parliament and legislature, for example, speaking of ‘Scotland continuing to lead the way internationally’ or ‘the world leader that we all want Scotland to be’. Lennon opened the debate with a metaphor of this ground-breaking community not as a nation, but as a body: ‘This debate is possible only because we are standing tall on the shoulders of previous generations of feminists, trade unionists and equality campaigners’. This envisages the collective that brought about the Act as a pyramid or chain of human bodies merging into a larger cross-generational whole.

(3) The nation defines its external boundaries through access to period products. This unified nation in which period products are freely accessible to all was imagined in clear distinction from neighbouring England. The border with England and the relationship to the English is negotiated through access to period products. This is a demarcation transcending the bloodshed ascribed to the past, and instead shifting to menses. National identity is created bloodlessly, but through products designed to hide menstrual blood. The discussion about the exact limits of the ‘universal’ access along the border with England is particularly relevant in the context of the current independence movement in Scottish politics, which tries to create a new nation state of Scotland as separate from the United Kingdom. It also coincides with the renegotiation the rights of EU citizens living in the UK following Brexit. What emerges in the discussions of the Period Products Act are the contested limits of a territorial understanding of nationhood. While the current Scottish National Party’s position is that nationhood is defined through residence in Scotland rather than through descent or lineage (which would be ‘ethnic nationalism’),²² the negotiations around the Period Products Act showed the uncertainties in this definition. The Act introduced a person’s physical presence in Scotland as an additional criterion that needs to be fulfilled for someone to be allowed access to period products, but that is not in itself enough to secure a right to access.

This discussion centred on the fear of ‘cross-border tampon raids’ which Findlay referenced in the parliamentary debate. This phrase was used in the Scottish press (e.g., Hutcheon, 2020; Murray, 2020; Hall, 2020) and its mention in the debate provoked immediate protest from members of the Scottish Government. The phrase rhetorically exaggerates and ridicules a concern that the Scottish Government had raised in a written submission to the Local Government and Communities Committee, which had prepared the bill for parliamentary debate (Scottish Parliament, 8 January 2020). The submission referred to the bill’s clause that a provision might have to be made against fraud and abuse of the scheme (the pilot scheme indicated that there was little abuse, and the phrase does not appear in the final version of the bill). Relevant in our context is that the government submission suspected exclusively people outside of Scotland of such illegal behaviour, warning against ‘people outside Scotland seeking access to the products or people accessing them to sell at a discounted rate outside Scotland’ (Scottish Parliament, 8 January 2020, Annex A, Written Submission from the Scottish Government, p. 9, para 46). The people who might sell and buy stolen goods were envisaged as ‘outside Scotland’, but not people in Scotland. People outside Scotland were thus classed as potential abusers of the scheme, and the Scottish local authorities providing the products as potential victims of crime: Scotland appeared to be under threat from the outside.

The same written submission by the Scottish Government also raised concerns about who exactly the provision of free period products for ‘everyone in Scotland’, as the text of the proposed bill then had it, might cover: ‘it is not clear whether this includes people who are visiting Scotland, for example, or who work in Scotland but live just over the border in England (and vice versa), or who would check on residency and therefore eligibility’ (Scottish Parliament, 8 January 2020, Annex A, Written Submission from the Scottish Government, p. 7, para 33). The people singled out for particular scrutiny here are those visiting Scotland and those living in England and working in Scotland, even though the Act does not concern tourist attractions or workplaces. The addition of ‘(and vice versa)’ formally includes people resident in Scotland and working in England, though this is not spelled out. The redundant place marker ‘just over the border’ emphasises the distinction and at the same time physical proximity between the two nations. Though the government submission did not ascribe a particular national identity to any of the groups mentioned, Lennon did so in her formal response to the submission by using the heading ‘eligibility of non-Scots’ (Scottish Parliament, 2020: 5). ‘Non-Scots’ appears to refer to those ‘visiting Scotland’ as well as those living in England and working in Scotland.²³ This makes national identity dependent on residency: a Scot is someone resident in Scotland, a non-Scot is someone not resident in Scotland. Though Lennon is a member of the Labour party, this is in line with the Scottish National Party’s recent so-called ‘civic’ rather than ‘ethnic’ definition of Scottish national identity.

The outcome of this discussion was that the amended bill specified that the provision is for those not only resident but also present on Scottish territory: ‘the needs of a person who lives in Scotland are to be regarded as all arising while in Scotland’. Those who are not resident but temporarily present in Scotland are excluded. Those who are resident are regarded as also being present in Scotland. The Period Products Act thus offers a new definition of the ‘Scotland’ who is granted universal access to menstrual products: people both resident and present in Scotland. At the same time, it demonstrates the importance of the land border to England as a focal point of political uncertainty.

Conclusion. On the basis of historical precedents, it has become visible that a crucial effect of the Period Products Act is that it redefines the nation’s relationship to blood. A nation, as I have argued, is often imagined as having in the past been united by blood and separated from its outside by bloodshed, and at the same time as in the present transcending blood ties. Blood for this reason comes up at moments of negotiating and redrawing the limits of a nation, as is currently the case in Scotland’s independence movement. Scotland is given unity by free, universal access to period products, which keeps menstrual blood invisible in the public sphere.

Conclusion

This article has situated the Period Products Act in two related imaginaries: that of the nation held together by and transcending blood in historical and political texts; and that of menstruation as something excluded from public view and discourse, which can nonetheless create bonds when the taboo is broken, in medical and fictional texts. Both imaginaries are related in their attempts to keep the public sphere free of actual blood, while at the same creating social bonds by speaking about blood.

On the basis of my historical overview of constructions of the Scottish nation in relation to (menstrual) blood, the free nation-wide circulation of discourse around blood that I observed in the first part of the article in the Act’s public debates now becomes legible as another way in which blood itself is kept out of the public sphere and yet retains a crucial role in forming it. Speaking about menstruation creates communal bonds not just among parliamentarians, but also among the general public. This community is created in parliament not directly by blood, but by discourse about products designed for dealing with this blood, so by an absence as much as a presence of blood. As I demonstrated in the second part of this article with reference to the premodern and early modern medical text The Secrets of Women, Gray’s modern novel Poor Things, and Loach’s film I, Daniel Blake, this pattern is not new in the period poverty debates, but based on a long history of understanding menstruation as stigmatising and best hidden. What is new in the debate is the prominence given to menstrual blood rather than blood more generally in the construction of the nation and of a discursive public sphere.

The fact that the Period Products Act in this way serves other agendas such as nation-building, and perpetuates privilege and menstrual stigma, however, should not distract from the significant progress it signals and achieves in the fight against poverty and against stigmatising those who menstruate. Many countries are currently working towards similar legislation, usually in the hope of achieving greater gender and economic equality. Menstrual stigma has a way of mutating and taking on new forms, despite the best intentions of those trying to tackle it. As long as the inequalities underlying menstrual stigma persist (specifically the devaluation of women and other genders, and the devaluation of the body in favour of discourse, together with intersectional factors such as age, socio-economic status and ethnicity), menstrual stigma will also persist. It is nonetheless important to make its new iterations visible, and to be aware of the unintended side-effects of even the most innovative—and welcome—legislation.

Competing Interests

The author’s involvement as an editor of this volume has not led to a conflict of interests. The author has been kept entirely separate from the peer review process for this article.