Saniya Ghanoui and Pavel Vasilyev, "The Global Menstrual Movement during the Cold War and Beyond"

April 27 @ 12PM via Zoom
Register Here: https://illinois.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYrdemqqTsrHtfh6-_oLahAds-cKt4GRlwl

This presentation highlights the different attitudes surrounding menstruation and processes of advertising menstrual products during the Cold War. From a U.S. perspective, Saniya Lee Ghanoui will present how, in the early years of the Cold War, product companies connected menstruation to broader notions of nationalism and patriotism. By the 1970s and 1980s, many of these same companies spread the idea of menstruation as a global phenomenon that American companies could address. Pavel Vasilyev extends the discussion by focusing on post-Soviet Russia and examines how new menstrual discourses and practices emerged and developed in the wake of the Soviet collapse. Seismic shifts in Russian politics, economy, society, and culture that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a new capitalist economy also resulted in profound changes in the politics of menstruation. 

Saniya Lee Ghanoui is finishing her PhD in History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where her research looks at the transnational history of sex education in the 20th Century. 

Dr. Pavel Vasilyev is a Senior Lecturer at HSE University in St. Petersburg and a Junior Research Fellow at Siberian State Medical University.