Mooncalf Menstrual Meat (MMM)

ABSTRACT

Mooncalf is a biological art project that employs the seemingly progenitive properties of menstrual fluid, hearkening back to matrilineal cultural beliefs that human embryos were created from or nurtured by menstrual blood. The generative properties of menstrual fluid are not in its haemoglobin content; rather, in still-viable cells and tissues shed with blood, vaginal secretions, and unique proteins. The concept of blood-generated progeny, historian Melissa L. Meyer explained, underlies many menstrual taboos, some of which continue to impact biocultural notions of menstruation. These taboos may shape biotechnological development, which Mooncalf addresses through TechnoFeminism. Use of my body materials in biotech processes is imperative to a TechnoFeminist ethos of creating new, embodied knowledge and wielding technology towards autonomy in hegemonic technoscientific spaces. Meyer suggested that menstrual taboos may have emerged not only to symbolically protect non-menstruators, but also to practically manage or control human reproduction. This economic function is a topic I expand upon within the context of reproductive labour and applications thereof in a technocratic world. With Mooncalf, I manipulate menstrual taboo to my advantage, towards self-determination through experimentation in a tissue culture lab, and further towards developing critique of technoscientific industry and its gendered sociocultural and economic impacts.

KEYWORDS:

• Taboo
• menstruation
• biotechnology
• tissue engineering
• TechnoFeminism
• blood
• cell culture
• stem cells
• female economy

Introduction: a tale of two cycles

Since the first COVID-19 infection I suffered in March 2020, I have experienced an array of symptoms including, but not limited to, reproductive system disturbances and neurological damage. In the latter case, one result has been a noticeable lack of coordination in my limbs. As an avid cyclist, I first noticed this new discoordination after unexpectedly falling off my bicycle, just three weeks into the infection. It was the first time I had fallen from a bicycle since my gangly growth spurt in sixth grade. Now, my newly abraded skin leaked red against the familiar, much-faded scar tissue on my knee. The true cause of this accidental fall wasn’t immediately apparent, since neurological damage hadn’t yet been confirmed a possible consequence of the new coronavirus disease. Likewise, neither had menstrual disturbances been acknowledged and suggesting any connection between uterine/blood-related problems and a ‘respiratory’ illness was misconstrued as anxiety.¹

After repeated COVID-19 infections over three years and recurring falls from my bicycle (with bloody injuries), I came to acknowledge my own new truths about my body more deeply: 1) that it is broadly and continuously impacted by the ramifications of the disease, regardless of what biomedicine had so-far determined, and 2) it is a sentient meat form that now bleeds rather unpredictably.² Pre-COVID infection, I had always bled with precise regularity during very predictable menstrual cycles. It was this reliable, innate scheduling that enabled me to develop a funded PhD project, to utilize this monthly recurring resource of menstrual fluid for tissue engineering experiments and related artistic creation. Following each COVID infection (and Comirnaty vaccination), my menstrual cycle also became uncoordinated and the reliance on my own body for research was repeatedly threatened. I mention the funding, the meaty form that I am, and the menstrual irregularities that threatened my research because these are all connected in the article that follows. Specifically, they are implicated in the philosophical direction and experimental success of the speculative biological art project that I will present, entitled Mooncalf.

Throughout this paper, I draw on a core text, Thicker Than Water: The Origins of Blood as Symbol and Ritual by American historian, Melissa L. Meyer (Meyer 2014). Meyer’s book is pertinent to some key considerations in the Mooncalf project. Notably, Meyer effectively encapsulates ideas and critiques presented by prominent cultural anthropologists who have investigated menstrual taboo, such as Alma Gottlieb and Thomas Buckley (Buckley et al. 1988). In this, she also provides an impressive array of case studies that exemplify historical developments, culturally explicit and universally symbolic meanings, and gendered nuances of a variety of menstrual or menstrual-adjacent taboos. With the Mooncalf project, I am interested in not only understanding but also manipulating menstrual taboo to my advantage and by proxy, to resist patriarchy. In sections that follow, I address how patriarchal categorizations of blood ‘quality’ have been (and continue to be) used to dismiss and/or control gestational processes and explain how Mooncalf works to challenge this.

My approach with this project has been to first negotiate existing taboos within the culture of institutional biosciences and try to expose any related inefficacies by magnifying them through bureaucratic performance. This ‘performance’ is not just in the sense of compliance to authorization requirements for biology lab use, but also through demonstrating and aestheticizing such compliance (or resistance) for an external audience – in essence, to ritually decontextualize, recontextualize and/or transform laboratory protocols by generating artistic outputs from scientific experimentation. I have been interested in how I might modify already ritualized protocols and their underlying taboos through feminist recontextualizations – especially, where gender overlaps with perceptions of the occult, as in witchcraft. My strategies have included the creation of video performances of adapted protocols, as well as objects that blend science and occult symbolism, objects that function as prototypes, technological apparatuses with live tissue contained therein, and microscopy (Figure 1). Ambiguity in terms of disciplinarity in my practice allows for the creation of liminal space; in a rigidly regulated laboratory, this provides interesting opportunities for establishing a measure of autonomy, by incorporating these new ‘rituals.’ This is essential in the process of generating work towards self-determination through experimentation in a tissue culture (wet) lab at a university, and further towards developing relevant feminist critique of related technoscientific industries and their gendered sociocultural impacts.

Figure 1. Installation of works for the matter of flux exhibition at art laboratory Berlin, including objects from the mooncalf project. © WhiteFeather Hunter, 2023.

These goals fall within the imperatives of a philosophy and ethos known as ‘TechnoFeminism’ developed by sociologist, Judy Wajcman (Wajcman 2004). TechnoFeminism is the recognition that technologies are neither neutral nor objective, as they are shaped by the sociocultural contexts in which they are developed and used. As such, TechnoFeminism can be both principle and practice, through deliberate enactments of and mastery over new technological tools for the purposes of influencing their meanings and applications. I am deeply interested in how TechnoFeminism has been taken up by intersectional feminist artists to agitate for bodily autonomy in a hyper-medicalized, hyper-industrialized, techno-capitalist society (Hunter 2021b). This is typically performed as resistance through ‘DIY bio’ and biohacking in autonomous spaces. With Mooncalf, TechnoFeminism is enacted by pushing the limits of allowable or useable biomaterials in a certified biosafety lab. It is at these margins that a new liminal space is created, where technical and material ambiguity can provide a position of advantage/autonomy in an otherwise tightly controlled research field, such as cellular biology. The DIY aspect of the Mooncalf project is in the use of personal biomaterials accessible only to me and ultimately under my control with regards to acquisition, labelling, transport (by bicycle), and development … so long as my post-COVID body cooperates (Figure 2). In this way, I can shape the outcomes.

Figure 2. Video still of biohazardous materials transport by bicycle. © WhiteFeather Hunter, 2023.

TechnoFeminism as a practice also necessarily interrogates economic conditions in which technologies are made accessible (or not) to a society under the influence of patriarchal capitalism. In this vein, I examine specific socioeconomic implications of menstrual taboos in the contexts of biotechnology and biomedicine. Meyer does not explicitly address economies of menstruation or the socioeconomic impacts of menstrual taboo in her book, other than to assess previous theories around an evolutionary, transactional relationship between sex and meat (Meyer 2014, 17). I will return to this relevant assessment in my evaluation of Mooncalf as a series of speculative experiments to culture a lab-grown menstrual ‘meat.’ With Mooncalf, part of my critique thus far has involved unpacking some of the false packaging of masculinist, eco-moralistic solutionism found in the biotech sector of capitalism, such as is seen with lab-grown meat and leather products (Hunter 2020; Zurr and Catts 2000, 2004). In this paper, I will expand on this to address the co-optation of what has historically been referred to as the ‘female economy’ through an analysis of gendered aspects of reproductive labour and its eventual industrialization through biotech developments (Power 2013). Finally, I will conclude with a suggestion for how menstruation might serve as a socioeconomic model for anti-capitalist resource management in an increasingly exhausted world.

Blood progeny and the birth of biotechnology

Recently, I conducted research within the collection of rare books and objects at the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic (Boscastle, UK); this provided me with some key evidence I had been seeking regarding a phenomenological trajectory in the development of biotechnology. Namely, that contemporary high-tech advances in regenerative medicine (such as tissue culture and engineering) have direct roots in folk magic and occult medicinal practices, traces of which are discernible in some current scientific protocols and discourse. In the following paragraphs, I connect a lineage of ritualized belief around reproductive body fluids, particularly menstrual fluid, and how this metaphysical scaffold of practices has utilized taboo to shift gendered power dynamics in biocultures over time – a goal I work to counter in the Mooncalf project.

In the Mooncalf lab experiments, I employ the seemingly progenitive properties of menstrual blood by utilizing components of the collected fluid for tissue culture purposes. The concept behind this hearkens back to widespread matrilineal cultural beliefs that human embryos were created from and/or nurtured by menstrual blood (Meyer 2014, 52, 64, 68, 123). Such beliefs were based on not fully understood facts that the appearance of menstrual excretions typically meant that conception did not occur, while lack of menstruation could indicate gestation. The assumption therefore was that menstrual blood must be taken up in and comprise the foetus. I have stated that menstrual blood is seemingly progenitive because the generative properties of menstrual fluid are not found in its haemoglobin content. Rather, the fluid contains still-viable tissues, cells and unique proteins that are shed along with blood and vaginal secretions (mucus, etc.) (Chen, Jingjing, and Xiang 2019; Yang et al. 2012) The foundational concept of blood-generated progeny, as Meyer has explained, is an underlying factor of many menstrual taboos, some of which are still observed and others, I will argue, continue to impact contemporaneous bio-cultural notions of menstruation (Meyer 2014, 49). These taboos may shape the direction of biotechnological development, which the Mooncalf project addresses through TechnoFeminism.

Taboos, as mediators of power, are meant to symbolically protect people, animals, or land/crops by observing time-regulated restrictions on food, work, and sex/socializing – and often have included containment measures (such as menstrual huts) (Hoskins 2002). Belief in the progenitive power of menstrual blood itself could have understandably led to an association of the signs of menstrual bleeding with death/sacrifice. Also, as Meyer points out, it was ‘critical for procreation, but was also a witch’s tool’ by some cultural understandings (Meyer 2014, 116). Thus, in the instance of menstruation, taboos are meant to carefully protect non-menstruators (and their food, livestock, etc.) from the otherwise unmitigated, uncontained life/death force of menstrual fluid. This life/death ambiguity generates a ‘liminal state,’ requiring ritual to negotiate the boundaries between danger and continuity (Meyer 2014, 82). Meyer speculated that menstrual taboos also serve(d) the function of promoting conception insofar as they determine allowable timeframes for heterosexual intercourse to occur, avoiding the less-fertile period of menstrual flow. The suggestion here is that taboos may have emerged to not only symbolically protect non-menstruators, but to also practically manage or control human reproductive potential. This practical, or economical function is a topic that I later expand upon, as applicable to the cultural value of the Mooncalf project.

Magic and occult practices (including taboos) are synonymous with cultural rituals of many (if not all) studied time periods, though these frameworks have sometimes been abstracted, and the meanings lost – or purposely revamped. For example, Meyer explained that emergent patriarchal biocultural ideologies, from the time of Aristotle, coopted the ‘power’ of menstrual blood by positing that semen was solely responsible for human conception. Or, at the very least, semen mixed with and activated (congealed, clotted or otherwise ‘firmed up’) menstrual blood, as the determinant instigator of life in the womb (Meyer 2014, 43, 53, 58–59, 61). Early science and medicine philosophers, such as Aristotle, believed that this seminal prepotency was transmuted directly from male venous blood, versus women’s abject (outside/disembodied/rejected) menstrual blood; in this view, mothers were receptacles who merely provided transubstantiated blood to their children. Other concurrent beliefs stipulated a cooperative role between the fluids, where semen was responsible for forming white tissue types such as bone, while menstrual fluid formed red tissues (Meyer 2014, 58, 105). I am interested in these precepts around which tissue types menstrual fluid may or may not be responsible for, as they are salient for the Mooncalf project: the endometrial lining shed during menstruation contains precursor stem cells; these cells qua cells are capable of differentiating into various distinct cell types and, ultimately, viable tissue forms (Lv et al. (2018)); Chen, Jingjing, and Xiang (2019) (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Endometrial tissue explant. © WhiteFeather Hunter, 2022.

Before discussion of the emergent (though still socially discouraged) use of menstrual-derived stem cells in biotechnology protocols, I will first detail early attempts at occult tissue culture (Marinaro 2023). These inceptive experiments exemplify the masculinist desire to usurp human reproduction through externalization via an artificial womb, now considered the cutting edge of biotech industry. Beliefs that asserted the primary vital agency of semen, or male-origin blood (as precursor of semen) in the formation of viable tissue or a foetus, are reflected in the ancient alchemical concept of the homunculus. The mythical homunculus was, essentially, a tiny bioengineered human clone. The early influential alchemist, Paracelsus believed that homunculi could be generated from semen deposited into sterile glass vials, which were then buried in horse manure for 40 days and ‘magnetized.’ This in vitro culture of sperm (cells) was believed to form the initial homunculus tissue shape, which then required artificial feeding with ‘arcanum sanguinis hominis’ (‘Arcanum of Blood’) whilst remaining in the equine compost incubator for a gestational period of 40 weeks. Paracelsus claimed that ‘if allowed to remain during that time in the horse-manure in a continually equal temperature, it will grow into a human child, with all its members developed like any other child, such as could have been born by a woman; only it will be much smaller’ (Hartman 1896, 256). Later alchemists would refine manure incubation methods by adding liquids that would induce fermentation (and thus, continuous heat) (Hartman 1896, 257).

The ‘Arcanum of Blood’ protocol developed by Paracelsus involves separating blood components, including the serum, which he refers to as ‘flegm,’ (phlegm) and then adding ‘water of the salt of blood’ to the remaining haemoglobin to produce a nutrient media:

Let the blood bee ſeparated from its flegm, which is ſeparated of its ſelfe, and is driven to the upper part. This water poure gently out of the veſſell, and inſtead of it put as much of the water of the ſalt of blood, which wee teach to make in our Chirurgie: That water doth preſently mixe with the blood, and preſerves it ſo, that it will never bee putrefied, or grow unſavory, but continue many years as freſh … Now this blood is the balſome of balſomes, and is called the Arcanum of blood, and it is ſo wonderful, as of ſuch great virtue, that it is incredible to be ſpoken; wherefore thou ſhalt conceale it as a great ſecret in Phyſick.

(Sędziwój et al. 1650, 203)

Interestingly, this set of occulted (concealed) instructions is not unlike the protocol I have developed to produce my own tissue culture nutrient media from menstrual fluid for the Mooncalf project. My fluid, collected in a menstrual cup and then transferred to sterile tubes, does have the tendency to separate itself into layers though it is still centrifuged to ensure a more complete separation between serum, tissue, and haemoglobin (Figure 4). As Paracelsus notes, the serum rises to the upper part, while the heavier blood cells sink to the bottom. This allows for the easy extraction of the serum, which I do more precisely by aspiration with a pipette versus pouring it off as Paracelsus suggests. The striking difference in our methods, however, is that I am using the serum component in vitro, as part of a nutrient formula, and typically discarding the red blood cell layer. Similarly, however, to the ‘water of the salt of blood’ that Paracelsus mentions, commercially available tissue culture nutrient media formulations contain a number of sodium additives, along with vitamins, amino acids, proteins, dye and other components to support shelf life and cell growth (ThermoFisher Scientific 2023).

Figure 4. Separated layers of menstrual fluid. © WhiteFeather Hunter, 2022.

The similarities between occult tissue culture and current methods don’t end there, either, particularly in terms of the ultimate purpose for the creation of an in vitro human proxy. The reason for creating a homunculus was to ultimately serve as spiritual scapegoat, much as their folksy forebears, mandrakes (Paracelsus 1894, 120–121). Mandrakes, ‘Mandragorae’ or various human-shaped roots of Mandragora officinarum and a few other plant species, were mythologically imbued with sentient properties (Paracelsus 1894, 334). By finding and using a mandrake as proxy, people believed that cosmic malevolence could be redirected from a human target. Here, too, with mandrakes, is a connection to the purported generative properties of semen, though with a morbid specificity: mandrakes, as explained folklorically by two of Samuel Beckett’s vagrant characters in Waiting for Godot, occur as the result of human male erection at the moment of death by hanging. The subsequent ejaculate fertilizes the ground beneath the suspended corpse, and from it, a humanoid hybrid grows (like the homunculus in its earthy compost). Such a scenario is described thus:

ESTRAGON:What about hanging ourselves?

VLADIMIR:Hmm. It’d give us an erection.

ESTRAGON:(highly excited). An erection!

VLADIMIR:With all that follows. Where it falls mandrakesgrow. That’s why they shriek when you pull themup. Did you not know that?

ESTRAGON: Let’s hang ourselves immediately!

(Beckett and Bryden 2010, 12)

The mandrake’s position as spiritual scapegoat or transmogrification agent was overlaid with the science of alchemical – and as I argue, precursory biotechnological – transformation. The pathos exemplified above is in the exchange of one (lesser) life to ultimately preserve another – in this case, where a fatally derived mandrake may later be used by someone else to metaphysically defer ill health. The sacrifice/deferment dynamic is part of the foundational altruistic concept behind organ donation or other tissue explant/implant (or even xenotransplantation) (Carney 2022). I will revisit this idea of biotech proxy in later paragraphs, within the context of tissue engineering and stem cell research in the Mooncalf project.

Technical rituals/empirical engagements with blood

In addition to continuing discussion of menstrual taboo and biotech development, here I will provide some technical details of experiments conducted as part of the Mooncalf project and compare my results to related research in evolutionary medicine. The implications for tissue engineering will be discussed in terms of the use of menstrual serum for lab-grown meat. I will then, in the section that follows, lead this discussion towards a conceptual application of my findings and their implications for developing alternative socioeconomic structures based on the innate bio-economics of menstruation.

It is unconventional to blend tech-oriented writing with the conceptual – however, my intention is that my transdisciplinary practice, which sits between distinct fields such as cellular biology, socio-ethic aspects of science, and feminist art/witchcraft, be presented with respect to the joint modes of expertise employed. This kind of boundary crossing is one of my main imperatives, to disrupt and transform otherwise siloed knowledge specializations. I do this through creative interrogation as a witch in a lab coat—she who confronts taboo with the help of artistic strategies, to generate new (empowering) meanings within standardized science cultures of practice (Figure 5).

Figure 5. Happiness is a Warm Gun, machine embroidered lab coat stained with menstrual fluid. © WhiteFeather Hunter, 2022.

Autonomy in working with one’s own biomaterials in the contemporary scientific laboratory is hard gained, particularly biomaterials embedded with sociocultural ambivalence, such as menstrual fluid. For the alchemist progenitors of modern biotechnology, menstruation was mostly abhorrent and repressed with abstracted taboos, divorced from the matriarchal contexts previously described. Menstrual taboos, ‘metamorphosed into connotations of uncleanness … ’ with, ‘[p]ollution constructions [correlating] strongly with patriarchy’ (Meyer 2014, 68). Contemporary treatments of menstrual fluid, or even any other type of female or ‘emasculated’ (ie. queer or gender nonconforming) blood, including venous blood, continue to reflect this attitude, in terms of controls that are based on sexual taboo, false premise and/or abstracted procedures (Bennett 2015). These modes of abstracted (and hierarchical) management procedures present multiple tiers of limitations, which construct bureaucratic barriers to ‘risky’ research and edgy new knowledge (Marinaro 2023).

I have previously detailed some of the alienating bureaucratic requirements for handling my own menstrual fluid within the context of scientific research in an academic institution, for the Mooncalf project: from assigning responsibility for my body to an external body (my research supervisor, biosafety officers, and the Human Research Ethics committee), to performing other modes of abstraction (Hunter 2020). To further elucidate, requirements included composing and signing a consent form to give myself (via my supervisor) permission to instrumentalize my own body for the sake of my research, complete with a Participant Information Sheet that contained instructions written by myself on the proper aseptic handling of my menstrual fluid. As Meyer pointed out, regarding cultural containment strategies and management practices, ‘[m]enstruating women and menstrual blood were [are] extensively ritualized and managed much more than is physiologically warranted’ (Meyer 2014, 122). This continues to hold true in the classification and management of menstrual fluid, even when it is simply transported from an institutional bathroom to a laboratory down the hall in the same building (Hey, Hunter, and St-Hilaire 2019).

The concept of different classifications of blood has its precept in ancient notions of quality, such as beliefs that, ‘The purest blood nourished the foetus. Mediocre blood became milk. The most wretched blood was spent in childbirth’ (Meyer 2014, 61). Within the context of the Mooncalf project and cell culture research in general, I have highlighted a biotech industry preference for what is arbitrarily considered more ‘stable’ (supposedly less hormonally fluctuating) male blood (Hunter 2020). In new protocols I have developed as part of the Mooncalf project, menstrual fluid quality was determined by establishing monthly endometrial tissue explants: I observed that the best tissue culture results could be achieved using samples collected within the first two days of menstruation. Therefore, I concluded that early menstrual fluid was the most effective (grade) for the acquisition of viable cells. I am not the first to define this parameter through lab experiments (Chen, Jingjing, and Xiang 2019; Patel et al. 2008; Toyoda, Cui, and Umezawa 2007). However, it is imperative to my working ethos of TechnoFeminist witchcraft that my determinations be based on empirically deduced knowledge of my own body and its materials, and whether they perform according to standards for reproducibility in science.³

The main goal of the Mooncalf project is to test the efficacy of my menstrual serum and menstrual-derived cells for culturing tissue, towards possible use in engineering so-called lab-grown ‘meat’ (Figure 6). This is done speculatively, as a biocultural provocation – to trigger taboo and explore the potential for wielding it to my advantage within a masculinist hegemony – but also to provoke discussion around the kinds of biomaterials used in the biotech industry to produce morally-cleansed products (e.g. falsely labelled, ‘clean’ meat). The failure of lab-grown or ‘clean meat,’ typically produced by culturing biopsied bovine muscle tissue/cells in nutrient media with antibiotics, foetal calf serum and other growth constituents, is not necessarily in its lack of aesthetic appeal (taste, texture, appearance, etc.). Rather, the ‘clean’ meat industry has failed in its so-far unfulfilled promise to provide a healthy, cruelty-free, eco-friendly alternative to conventional livestock management and meat production (Hanson and Ranney 2020; Reuters 2019). The US-based Center for Food Safety has reported that one of the many potential problems of current lab-grown meat production methods is the use of modified foetal stem cells for scalability, as these cell types proliferate better than muscle cells and can later be differentiated into muscle tissue (Hanson and Ranney 2020). Aside from problematic acquisition methods, the modified stem cells used in these meat products may be prone to mutation. What if unmodified menstrual stem cells were used instead, and menstrual serum instead of foetal calf serum? Studies have already demonstrated the, ‘remarkable myogenic capability’ of menstrual-derived stem cells (Toyoda, Cui, and Umezawa 2007), meaning these cells are superior in their capacity to become contractile muscle tissue. While the Mooncalf project raises the above questions and suggests possible outcomes, I do not propose any type of solutionism with my work. On the contrary, I propose more problems, detailed below.

Figure 6. Tissue culture flasks with menstrual-derived cells. © WhiteFeather Hunter, 2023.

The results of some of my more recent experiments may indicate that menstrual fluid (serum) contains a biochemical agent, such as a protein or enzyme, that facilitates the release of tissue from its substrate (as in, decidua from the uterine wall). I speculate that this agent may function adjacently to already known hormonal triggers for expulsion of the endometrium (Emera, Romero, and Wagner 2012), since my tissue culture experiments have not included hormone additives. Conversely, it may be the lack of hormone additives in my experiments that have triggered a ‘letting go’ effect: healthy cells lift away from the petri dish progressively over time versus adhering to and proliferating on its bottom surface, as cells in culture typically would. Emera, Romero, and Wagner have identified an apoptotic (cell death) pathway in endometrial stem cells that have had their progesterone source removed (Emera, Romero, and Wagner 2012). However, interestingly, my observations thus far indicate that the possible biochemical agent I mention also acts on other cell types, such as those I have experimented with in vitro: mouse muscle and connective tissue cells, and human dermal fibroblasts (from neonatal foreskins), along with my menstrual-derived cells. Each of these cell types behave similarly in the menstrual serum, with gradually reduced cell adhesion (Figure 7), or an increase in ‘letting go.’ As far as I have been able to determine, this function has not been studied outside of the phenomenon of menstruation, nor have its implications been further explored. I have named this biochemical agent, if indeed it exists, the ‘letting go’ agent, for lack of full scientific clarity.⁴ More experiments could determine if a protein-rich (and sustainable, cruelty-free) menstrual serum alternative in producing lab-grown meat would ultimately fail, due to this ‘letting go’ agent. For example, it could cause cells to fall from the 3D scaffolds they are grown on to give them a meat-like structure, unless perhaps progesterone additives were included. This, of course, could present problems in terms of implications for human health. Or it could limit the market for Mooncalf Menstrual Meat (MMM) to menopausal and perimenopausal individuals, such as myself, who might benefit from additional progesterone. I offer this as a tongue-in-cheek suggestion for how ageing women might feature prominently in more Technofeminist goals in bioscience; I invite scientists in the field of cellular biology (specifically, proteomics, or the study of proteins) to further investigate questions I have raised above regarding the ‘letting go’ bioagent.

Figure 7. Comparative microscopy showing reduced cell adhesion over a five-day period, in C2C12 cells grown in human menstrual serum (HMS) versus those grown in fetal bovine serum (FBS) © WhiteFeather Hunter, 2022.

It is the ‘letting go’ agent that I will next extrapolate from to outline menstruation as model for anti-capitalist resource management. This desire for a new model is as counter-model to the currently disastrous, capitalistic, colonialist, tech-fetishistic mode of exponential growth. The exponential growth model is fuelled in part by the biotech industry (including the lab-grown meat industry), both practically and conceptually. Not only does masculinist biotechnology seek to immortalize its progenitors through controlled replication via an externalized uterus (biotech proxy), but its quest for ever-greater scalability for maximizing profit could produce monstrous results. In the section that follows, I address this monstrosity and suggest an alternative inspired by the physiological and culturally taboo functioning of menstruation.

Menstruation as model for anti-capitalist resource management

As an innate technology, the bodily systematic functioning of a menstrual cycle is one of resource preparedness and sustainability, through cyclical accumulation of material (menses: blood, cells, and tissue) and then release or resorption of excess/unneeded matter. Menstruation necessitates a brief pause, to begin accumulation again. Here, I propose that menstruation/menstrual fluid, with its ‘letting go’ action, serve as a time-honoured model for material (re)distribution-one that runs counter to the truly problematic capitalist model of unmitigated accumulation and growth. After first revisiting the historical framing of menstruation as a problematic interruption to reproductive labour, I will discuss two relevant cultural models that have functioned to interrupt production and/or accumulation. Also, how reframing reproductive labour through a TechnoFeminist lens suggests not only a possible social corrective but an economic one as well.

In the early 19th century, Dr. John Power, MD, wrote extensively on the management of the ‘female economy’—an economy tied to female reproductive capacity to sustain the growth of the labour force (Power 2013). This economic labour, growth and production perspective had much earlier roots in the European feudal landscape; Meyer described these as, ‘efforts by pronatalist lords and officials to increase the number of people (labourers and renters) on the land by giving pregnant women special favours [sic]’ (Meyer 2014, 63). Feminist social scientist, Silvia Federici has provided an extensive analysis of the historical development of mercantilism and capitalism as systems tied to the incentivized or enforced reproductive labour of women (Federici 2014, 87). This is something that plays out afresh in late-stage capitalist economies, with the recriminalization of abortion in the United States, for example (Froio 2021). As a proponent of this biopolitical economy centred in the functions of the uterus, Power problematized menstruation as misfortune, offering numerous remedies for the afflictions of the ‘monthly courses’ (curses), not the least of which was for women to refrain from reading and education or other mental ‘excitement’ (Power 2013, 40). In the context of reproductive labour, the ‘sanguineous evacuation’ of the menstrual cycle was then, and has since been repeatedly presented as an evolutionary accident with no value, since it is seen as a disruption to the more ‘natural’ or fetishized ‘primitive’ state of incessant impregnation (Finn 1998; Power 1844, 11) Such an industrialist lens applied to the reproductive cycle leaves no room for pause, and positions menstruation as ‘deviance’ (Power 2013, 35).

Further to this, the occurrence of menarche, or the onset of menstruation, has been conflated in different cultures across different eras, with a time to teach menstruating girls the expected behaviours for becoming women (Meyer 2014, 93). Likewise, the ‘problem’ with menstruation, or the problematizing of those who menstruate has called for rituals of propriety to preserve fertility and promote gestation. These instructed behaviours are not just meant for physiological ‘care’ but also modes of relational ‘care’ with regards to expectations for gendered interactions. Meyer highlighted that patriarchal views of the ‘female economy’ also include an aspect of male entitlement: child-bearers hold the power to perpetuate patrilineages (or not), and thus remind men of their lack of power in this regard. This renders those with fertile (and menstruating) uteruses as risky, requiring controls (Meyer 2014, 73). Their receptivity to responsibility for the continuation of kith and kin render them at once dangerous and powerful; life (as socioeconomic resource) hangs in the balance of their right performance and willingness to enact social reproduction on behalf of their community.

Menstruation can, alternately, inhibit a person’s capacity to perform labour tasks, imbuing it with an additional aspect of taboo in the requirement for a ‘time out’ from regular productive or social functioning.⁵ As previously discussed, menstrual taboos have frequently, throughout history and cross-culturally, restricted participation in regular labour tasks, due the phenomenological power that menstrual blood exudes. Such ritualized boundaries recognize the importance of paused activity, within the larger schema of community wellbeing. Before I further suggest implementation of an economic model that mimics menstrual taboo constraints on labour, as well as its physiological function of ‘letting go’, I look to two existing models of community governance through rest and redistribution. Both of the following models have borne the brunt of colonial capitalism, past and present.

The Pacific Northwest (Canadian) First Nations tradition of the Potlatch ceremony was a ritualized community event involving wealth redistribution of surplus materials and sacred objects to members of the community, by high-ranking individuals who had accumulated excess material wealth over time. The Potlatch threatened the values of expanding 19^th century colonial industry and was criminalized for decades, as part of assimilation policy (Gadacz 2006). This colonial policing disproportionately affected First Nations women: imposed patriarchal cultural values led to loss of their ‘moon time’ (menstruation) ceremonies and other Potlatch ceremonies. Thus, they were excluded from traditional community leadership roles within redistribution structures (Monkman 2017). The second model I wish to review is the contemporary ‘Rest is Resistance’ movement, which agitates for time out from disproportionate burden tied to social (re)productivity. This movement occurs within anti-capitalist and decolonial frameworks through the organization, The Nap Ministry (Hersey 2022). Promulgated by artist and public speaker, Tricia Hersey, The Nap Ministry presents an alternative economic structure based on rest, using community building as a resource to serve social justice goals. This structure is envisioned as resisting ‘grind culture’ (techno-industrial capitalism) by refusing perpetual productivity – which largely relies on the bodies of women, especially women of colour. Capitalist hyper-productivity cannot occur without the invisibilized service of women, particularly their unpaid labour involved in (sometimes coerced) childbearing and rearing. I propose, based on these models and on the physiology and taboo of the menstruating body, that when applied to social conceptions of the reproductive cycle, menstruation again be seen as a powerful symbol to the larger community: to observe stages of pause and reset, and to ritualize the release of goods/energy as an intentional economic strategy with wider applications. Hardly waste, the only refuse of menstruation is in the refusal to over-exploit bodies, labour and resources.⁶

When I am menstruating, I am not necessarily resting in response; it has become the prime time for the collection, transport (by bicycle), manipulation and incubation of my menstrual fluid for the purposes of scientific experimentation and art production. Also, this is done with some sense of urgency as I grow evermore cognizant of the approach of menopause, in combination with my body’s post-covid unreliability. I recognize that assigning myself urgent ‘work’ within the timeframe of each remaining menstrual cycle is seemingly hypocritical to some of the values I endorse in this paper. However, my menstrual period is also a time of recognizing that the act of monthly bleeding is a kind of ‘job’ being performed by my uterus (and my entire body). Assigning economic value to this work, in terms of its role in my research, functions in an anti-capitalist capacity: by acknowledging that the innate labour of my reproductive body is under my own command, I permit myself ease from the expectations of work elsewhere within the wider sphere of my paid activities. Further to this, and from a Technofeminist perspective, reclamation of my body from capitalist reproductive labour imperatives, to instead use the products of my fertility for auto-exploration within a technoscientific milieu, enables me to shape its epistemic symbols and meanings. My menstrual fluid, then, has become a precious commodity under my own management, for my own uses, towards a more empowered stance regarding labour and productivity within the imperatives of the institution I work for.

The goals of my research with the Mooncalf project have been to share the technical aspects of the methods I’ve developed for serum production and cell culture in a non-proprietary mode, along with any new insights gained along the way. This new knowledge has been formally disseminated within academic communities, but also informally to a community of like-minded witches, artists, healthcare workers, deviant scientists, etc. to inspire them to similarly investigate the tech potential of their own body materials, within whatever variety of informal spaces they conjure. This informal dissemination has occurred via an international collective I founded in 2019, called the Bioart Coven. With its 75 members across all continents, Bioart Coven is a topic for another paper, but takes several of the theoretical concepts that I use to contextualize my work for the Mooncalf project and puts those theories into practice. Part of this is through my efforts to generate collective modes of resistance through shared community goals; these have mostly centred on how to use menstrual and other body fluids in developing new tech tools that acknowledge and serve my desire for bodily autonomy and economic capacity building, as activism.

Conclusion

The Mooncalf project utilizes a rarely manipulated material, menstrual fluid, as a biotech resource while pointing to the fact that it remains ‘untouchable’ in the institutional laboratory world of biohazardous substances. It is thus managed through bureaucratic rituals of containment and control that reflect abstracted notions of longstanding cultural taboo. Working hands-on with the subject of my body through so-called objective scientific methods has brought me to the notion of my corpus as a meaty body that sometimes bleeds unpredictably, and messily – this has been conceived of by the hegemony as a ‘problem’ both physiologically and culturally, a risk to be managed. As I have shown, these ideas stem from ancient notions of differing blood quality and purposes, which include patriarchal co-optations and control of the power of gestation.

By positioning culturally ambiguous human female reproductive biomaterial as potentially consumable lab-grown ‘meat,’ Mooncalf triggers taboo. Since taboos were introduced to mediate a spiritually/morally ambiguous phenomenon such as menstruation, what new taboos would arise around Mooncalf as a meat product? Who would be allowed to consume it? Would I be ‘good’ meat, as ethical tissue cultured for consumption? Moralistically- and aesthetically-sound meat? Would women become yet another source for exploitation? In this, does virtue become a substrate for the biotechnological growth of objectified new components of self, such as the early alchemists hoped? To what end?

Creating a technologized product such as Mooncalf is meant to expose the already abstracted, objectified, and extracted state of nonhegemonic bodies within Western scientific technospheres. As technologized bodies that are compartmentalized into discrete, artificially embodied, sterile units (from 2D cell monolayers to 3D organoids) for the sake of supposedly objective technoscientific discovery, our biomaterials serve as a meaty proxy for the larger problems of humanity. This othering that Mooncalf teeters on is paradoxical – on the one hand, it should enable the exploitation of menstruators as resource; yet, when reclaimed, the othered subject/object becomes confrontational and subversive. The messy, leaky unpredictability of my body is a trouble I continue to engage with, to disrupt the ‘clean’ categorizations of capitalist industry-focused imperatives for science and knowledge production.

By both reclaiming and repositioning the deviance of menstruation as an innate wisdom, I have offered that menstrual taboo and physiological function might instruct on more equitable resource preparedness and management, in terms of socioeconomic strategies for wealth (re)distribution and rest. However, as I have pointed out, none of what Mooncalf offers is meant as solutionism, which is the benchmark of technocapitalist marketing moralism. What I offer instead are conceptual and pragmatic strategies for resistance, through a TechnoFeminist reframing of menstruation and menstrual fluid as axes for self- and community empowerment.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to gratefully acknowledge the support of PhD supervisors, Dr. Ionat Zurr and Dr. Stuart Hodgetts in facilitating the laboratory experiments for the Mooncalf project, as well as for valuable feedback in the formulation of this text. The author would also like to acknowledge the pivotal role that SymbioticA has served in the inspiration and development of the Mooncalf project. Additionally, the author would like to extend warm thanks to director, Simon Costin and administrator, Fergus Moffat at the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, for their support and assistance with part of the research conducted for this paper.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. I have written about my experiences with this phenomenon that occurred at the beginning of the pandemic (Hunter and McKinney 2024). It has also been more broadly elucidated in the recent book, Unwell Women (Cleghorn 2022).

2. These same truths showed up in later research findings. Such findings, however, indicate the general lack of research regarding the female reproductive cycle, as well as still unknown impacts of neurological damage (Bhola et al. 2022; Lebar et al. 2022; Lee et al. 2022; Mahdawi 2021; Male 2021).

3. As outlined in my previously published paper, The Witch in the Lab Coat – Deviant Pathways in Science (Hunter 2021b).

4. Very recent research, initially prevented from publication due to outdated negative cultural beliefs, specifies that menstrual fluid contains, ‘soluble factors’ that occur within what is referred to as the ‘secretome’ and which are currently under clinical study for biomedical applications (Marinaro 2023).

5. I present this as an additional taboo similarly to how Meyer explains that (ironically enough) pregnancy also ‘contaminates’ regular social and socioeconomic functioning by requiring a time out and thus, obtains a certain untouchability and unseeable quality (Meyer 2014, 63, 73).

6. A brief form of some of the text in this section was previously published in M is for Menstruation (Hunter 2021a).