Periods, Pains, Pills, and Performance—Fighting Blood, Bodies and Biology

ABSTRACT This paper draws on various data from long‐term immersion in combat sports to explore the period experiences of cis women fighters. We blend theoretical ideas from the social scientific literature on menstruation and the sociology of medicalization, pain and injury. Based on rich empirical data and theoretical tools, we argue that the “ontological pervasiveness” of periods resulted in women “fighting” parts of their own biology within traditional male‐dominated spaces—by mitigating, managing and minimizing their periods through various strategies. There were specific and potentially damaging consequences that flowed from this. While we center women's bodies, we argue that a key problem is not the bleeding body per se, but rather the way female biology is hidden and ignored. This is particularly evident in how period blood is marked out as symbolically different—rendered shameful and in need of concealment—in contrast to the routinized, accepted and even valorized forms of bleeding that occur through participation in such sports. By “suffering in silence,” the tensions between their roles as fighters—as constructed following latent masculinized norms that still frame most sports—and women remained largely unacknowledged.