The Woman’s Body & Severance

The woman's menstrual cycle faces erasure from the work structures of conventional monolithic capitalism. I find that this is one aspect that is linked to the idea of severance: being severed from our bodies, our lands, our food sources and each other. The woman worker who prepares herself to work in urban and corporate spaces is expected and expects herself to work in the same style and frequency as man, and also to perform all month and all year in a regular imitable routine fashion -- which on a side note, is a high expectation for evolving growing men and women alike -- when in fact the female body goes through four different phases in their natural cycle: follicular, ovulation, luteal and menstruation.

Each of these phases within the course of 28 days have different features - productivity and energy levels are high during ovulation, and fatigue is prone to set in during menstruation, for example, due to great changes in levels of the hormones progesterone and estrogen, as the woman's reproductive setup changes configuration (the body works to repeatedly build and then break the lining of the uterus). This is a complex process that we are severed from through: a general hegemonic disbelief in the impact of the cycle on a woman, harmful and reductive stereotypes in the same vein that problematizes some symptoms ("she's on her period, she's overreacting") while erasing others that could be used advantageously in a cycle-conscious workplace, as well as conventional sanitary products that alienate us from acknowledging and engaging with this bodily process.

The structures, rhythms, and expectations of corporate and urban labor presume a body that is linear, stable, and endlessly repeatable, a body that can perform at the same tempo every day, every week, every quarter, every year. It is the machination of the human being, manifested in the female body and the denial of its features, turning it into a political site of systemic violence as often is the case in matters of power and control in the patriarchy.

This presumed body is not just abstract. It is implicitly male, or more precisely, modeled on a narrow fantasy of masculine constancy. The idealized worker in a monotheistic capitalistic system is one that performs in a style, frequency and emotional register that feeds into a predictable graph that can ensure production and profit. Productivity becomes something continuous and imitable, rather than cyclical, variable, or responsive – rather than something that is alive.

The female body does not move in a straight line. It moves in cycles. And yet the system does not adapt to the body. The body is instead disciplined to disappear within the system. As participants of such systems we wilfully consent to this disappearance, this severance, this annihilation, on being fed the myth that nullification of self serves the utilitarian good of building capitalist empire.

This convention of negating women’s bodies is akin to the erasure of the parental experience from many corporate workplaces that subscribe to monolithic capitalism, propagating a collective myth that the bodies and minds of men and women remain unchanged after a few months of producing a child. Disconnection from the reality of the body experience, in order to be a beacon of machine-like efficiency and productivity, is even rewarded by such a system with wealth and status building incentives. Myth-making is therefore an integral part of the culture of severance. A convention of alienating oneself from the changes in the body then breeds otherizing of the self, and this feeds into implicitly cultivating alienation interpersonally and structurally.

Pregnancy, birth, and caregiving are treated as temporary interruptions rather than profound transformations. Cyclical changes in the body are treated as inconvenient distractions rather than testaments to the body’s capacity to shapeshift and birth life itself. The myth is this: that across the span of time insofar as a company or institution’s market goals are concerned, bodies, priorities, nervous systems, and identities remain intact and unchanged.

Severance, then, is not an accident. It is a cultural achievement. Fatigue becomes failure. Sensitivity becomes weakness. Cyclicality becomes unreliability. This internal othering does not remain private. It quietly reproduces itself in all spheres of living. Workplaces become less tolerant of difference. Policies become less responsive to variation. Entire systems are built around the denial of human fluctuation.

The woman’s body, in this sense, is not an exception to the system, it is a diagnostic lens, a metaphor for larger dis-ease and disconnect. It reveals the deeper fantasy at the heart of capitalism: that humans can be made into stable instruments of output, severed from the rhythms that sustain life.