Seeing Red: Menstrual Art and Political Portraiture in the Trump Era

Summary

In the middle of the 2015 United States presidential election race, artist Sarah Levy made a portrait of candidate Donald Trump with her menstrual blood. The work referenced Trump’s comments about menstruation during a conversation with journalist Meghan Kelly, in which he said that she had ‘blood coming out of her wherever’. While much discussed in the media, the portrait has not received the critical art historical attention it deserves. This paper considers the artistic, cultural, political and aesthetic inspiration of the creation of the menstrual artwork ‘Whatever’ (Bloody Trump), the techniques and materiality of the portrait, and its subsequent reception in public, art institutional and media discourse. Drawing on interviews with the artist and critical visual analysis in the tradition of feminist art history, this paper argues that ‘Whatever’ (Bloody Trump) should be understood as an important artwork that aesthetically interprets and recalls the white supremacist politics and strong menstrual taboos of the Trump era.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Donald J. Trump interviewed by Don Lemon, CNN Tonight, CNN, 7 August 2015, https://edition.cnn.com/videos/us/2015/08/08/donald-trump-megyn-kelly-blood-lemon-intv-ctn.cnn (Accessed 18 April 2023).

2 Holly Yan, “Donald Trump’s ‘Blood’ Comment About Megyn Kelly Draws Outrage”, CNN, 8 August 2015.

3 Jonathan Allen, “Donald Trump’s New Misogynistic Low”, Vox, 7 August 2015.

4 “Donald Trump Makes Menstruation Jibe at Megyn Kelly – Audio”, The Guardian, 8 August 2015.

5 Trump interviewed by Jake Tapper on CNN’s Today Show, 10 August 2015.

6 Jill Wood, “(In)Visible Bleeding: The Menstrual Concealment Imperative”, in The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies, 319–336.

7 Correspondence was conducted over email on 2 and 3 December 2019. Levy also sent me a separate document entitled “cropped hatemail”. Levy was briefed about the project and her rights as an interviewee beforehand.

8 Curated by Gorch Pieken/Bundeswehr Military Museum, Gewalt und Geschlecht: Männlicher Krieg – Weiblicher Frieden? Dresden, 2018. My thanks to the curators at Kursiv and Bundeswehr Military Museum for information.

9 Chris Bobel, Inga Winkler, Breanne Fahs, Katie Ann Hasson, Elizabeth Arveda Kissling (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies, New York, 2020.

10 Including Janice Delaney, Mary Jane Lupton, Emily Toth, The Curse: A Cultural History of Menstruation, Urbana and Chicago, 1976.

11 Ruth Green Cole, “Bloody Women Artists”, Occasional Journal (2015), https://enjoy.org.nz/publishing/the-occasional-journal/love-feminisms/text-bloody-women-artists (accessed 5 May 2023); Clarice Rios, Daniela Manica, “(In)visible Blood: Menstrual Performances and Body Art”, Vibrant: Virtual Brazilian Anthropology Vol 14, No 1, 2017; Chris Bobel, New Blood: Third-Wave Feminism and the Politics of Menstruation, New Brunswick, 2010; Breanne Fahs, Out for Blood: Essays on Menstruation and Resistance, New York, 2016.

12 Emily Via, “Menstruating and Doing Masc: Trans Experiences of Menstruaton”, PhD thesis, New College of Florida, 2019.

13 C. Sutton, “Hysterectomy: A Historical Perspective”, Baillieres Clinical Obstetric and Gynaecology Vol 11, No 1, 1997, pp. 1–22.

14 Richard A. Soloway, Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Declining Birth Rate in Twentieth-Century Britain, Chapel Hill, 2014.

15 Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, New York, 2008.

16 Jo-Ann Owusu, “Menstruation and the Holocaust”, History Today Vol 69, No 5, 2019.

17 Ela Przybylo, Breanne Fahs, “Feels and Flows: On the Realness of Menstrual Pain and Cripping Menstrual Chronicity”, Feminist Formations Vol 30, No 1, 2018, pp. 206–229.

18 Jeva Lange, “61 Things Donald Trump has Said about Women”, The Week, 16 October 2018.

19 Sally King, “Premenstrual Syndrome (PMS) and the Myth of the Irrational Female”, in Chris Bobel et al., The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies, 287–302.

20 Sophie Laws, Issues of Blood, London, 1990. For discussion of the menstrual taboo and its multi-facetted iterations around the world, see Buckley and Gottlief, Blood Magic: The Anthropology of Menstruation, Berkeley, 1988, Elizabeth A. Kissling, “Bleeding Out Loud: Communication About Menstruation”, Feminism and Psychology Vol 6, 1996, pp. 481–504.

21 Heather Saul, “Women are Live-Tweeting their Periods at Donald Trump to Prove Menstruation Can’t be Used Against Them as an Insult”, Independent, 15 September 2015; see also the #PeriodsForPence movement (i.e. Vice President to Trump, Mike Pence) in Berkley D. Conner, “Menstrual Trolls: The Collective Rhetoric of Periods for Pence”, in The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies, 885–899.

22 Abigail Jones, “The Fight to End Period Shaming is Going Mainstream”, Newsweek, 20 April 2016.

23 R. Green-Cole, “Painting Blood: Visualizing Menstrual Blood in Art” in The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies, 787–801.

24 C.M. Røstvik, Bee Hughes, “Menstruation in Art and Visual Culture”, in The International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication, Hoboken, 2020; Una Mathiesen Gjerde, “Blodig alvor: Menstruasjonskunst i Skandinavia fra 1970 til 2015”, MA thesis: Københavns Universitet, July 2017.

25 Jen Lewis, Widening the Cycle: A Menstrual Cycle & Reproductive Justice Art Show, 2015; B. Hughes, “Performing Periods: Challenging Menstrual Normativity through Art Practice”, Doctoral thesis, Liverpool John Moores University, 2020.

26 C. Bobel, “Disciplining Girls Through the Technology Fix: Modernity, Markets, Materials”, in The Managed Body: Developing Girls and Menstrual Health in the Global South, Cham, 2019, pp. 243–280.

27 Røstvik, “Blood Works: Judy Chicago and Menstrual Art since 1970”, Oxford Art Journal Vol 42, No 3, 2019, pp. 335–353.

28 Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America, New York, 1999, 175; see also Lisa E. Bloom, Jewish Identities in American Feminist Art, New York, 2006.

29 Brodkin, 2006, p. 172.

30 Røstvik, 2019.

31 James M. Bradburne, Blood: Art, Power, Politics and Pathology, Munich, 2001; Beate Fricke, “A Liquid History: Blood and Animation in Late Medieval Art”, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics Vol 63/64, 2013, pp 53–69; Fahs, “Smear It on Your Face: Menstrual Art, Performance, and Zines as Menstrual Activism”, in Out for Blood: Essays on Menstruation and Resistance, New York, 2016.

32 J. Weiss-Wolf, Periods Gone Public, New York, 2017, introduction.

33 Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality, London, 1992, 107.

34 “About”, Sarah Levy official website: https://www.sarahlevyart.com/about (all online sources accessed 15 July 2021).

35 John Berger, “The Ideal Critic and the Fighting Critic”, in Landscapes: John Berger on Art, London, 2018, first published in 1959, p. 97.

36 Jillian Steinhauer, “President Trump has Inspired Art. That’s Not Always a Good Thing”, The New York Times, 22 February 2019.

37 “About”, Tyler Shields website, 2021: https://www.tylershields.com/about.

38 Nead, 1992, pp. 86–87.

39 Nead, 1992, p. 107.

40 For example Peter York, “Trump’s Dictator Chic”, Politico Magazine, March/April Issue 2017; Stephen Bayley, “What Donald Trump’s Taste Tells Us About Him”, The Spectator, 22 December 2016; Robin Givhan, “Trump’s Catastrophic Fashion Choices in England were Not Just a Sign of Bad Taste”, The Washington Post, 5 June 2019; Robert Wellington, “‘A Poor Person’s Idea of a Rich Person’: Donald Trump’s Gaudy Taste”, The Sydney Morning Herald, 9 March 2017.

41 M. H. Miller, “‘Absolutely Gross, Degenerate Stuff’: Trump and the Arts”, ARTnews, 4 April 2016.

42 Henry Grosshans, Hitler and the Artists, New York, 1983; Peter Adam, Art of the Third Reich, New York, 1992; Neil Levi, “‘Judge for Yourselves!’ – The ‘Degenerate Art’ Exhibition as Political Spectacle”, October Vol 85, 1998, pp. 41–64.

43 Nead, 1992, p. 107.

44 “We Painted with Our Period Blood”, Buzzfeed, 17 June 2017, https://www.buzzfeed.com/watch/video/21862.

45 Chella Quint, Be Period Positive: Reframe your Thinking and Reshape the Future of Menstruation, London, 2021.

46 “We Painted … .”, 2017.

47 “We Painted … ”, 2017.

48 “We Painted … ”, 2017.

49 “We Painted … ”, 2017.

50 Joanna Woodall, Portraiture: Facing the Subject, Manchester, 1977.

51 Fiona Johnstone, Kirstie Imber (eds.), Anti-Portraiture: Challenging the Limits of the Portrait, London, 2020.

52 Tanya Woloshyn, “Regenerative Tanning: Pigmentation, Racial Health and the cure de soleil on the Côte d’Azur, c.1890–1936,” in Fae Brauer, Serena Keshavjee (eds.), Picturing Evolution and Extinction: Regeneration and Degeneration in Modern Visual Culture, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2015, pp. 193–216; “Donald Trump’s Orange Face May be Funny, but this Tanning Historian Says It Masks Something Deeper”, The Conversation, 1 August 2018.

53 Donald Trump, “Bring Back the Death Penalty: Bring Back Our Police!”, Daily News, 1 May 1989.

54 Correspondence with Levy, 2 December 2019.

55 Chioma Uwagwu, Tiaryn Daniels, David Todd Lawrence, “Art and Uprising: The George Floyd and Anti-Racist Street Art Database”, National Museum of American History Behring Center Blog, 27 August 2020.

56 Correspondence with Levy, 2 December 2019.

57 Correspondence with Levy, 2 December 2019.

58 Correspondence with Levy, 2 December 2019.

59 Dan Duray, “Blood Art: A Clotted History from Marc Quinn to Johnny Depp”, The Guardian, 16 August 2016.

60 Correspondence with Levy, 2 December 2019.

61 “We Painted  … ”, 2017.

62 Owusu, 2019.

63 Correspondence with Levy, 2 December 2019.

64 Brodkin, 2006, p. 172.

65 Adam Soboczynski, “Gender in Dresden”, Zeit Online, 2 May 2018, https://www.zeit.de/2018/19/militaerhistorisches-museum-dresden-ausstellung-gender (accessed 10 May 2023). My thanks to colleague Dr Christoph Kalter for translating.

66 Armin Wagner interviewed in Adam Soboczynski, “Gender in Dresden”, Zeit Online, 2 May 2018.

67 “About: Artist Statement”, Sarah Levy website, May 2018, https://www.sarahlevyart.com/about.

68 My thanks to my peer reviewers who suggested the dirty and cruelty angle.

69 Dianna Taylor, “Feminist Rage: Countering Sexual Violence and Sexual Humiliation”, Signs Vol 47, No 1, 2021, pp. 81–104.

70 The American College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, “Menstruation in Girls and Adolescents: Using the Menstrual Cycle as a Vital Sign”, Committee Opinion Number 651, December 2015.