Gender Makes Me Sick: PMS and the Feminised Body

Abstract

This study examines the social construction of the gender specific disorder Premenstrual Syndrome (PMS) by analysing the discourses generated by four key sites. These are the scientific literature from the biological and psychological disciplines from the period 1931 to 2003, mass media accounts of PMS, self-help texts produced for a New Zealand audience and semi-structured qualitative interviews with a group of women on their understanding of the disorder. These four sites have been selected to examine how our knowledge and understanding of PMS is the product of social processes and the interaction between different groups. Yet PMS is also a subjective material experience for some women and analysing these sites through a material/discursive approach allows an analysis of material processes and practices and the ways in which these are constructed discursively. This then moves the analysis away from the material/discursive divide. This theoretical position has been employed to reveal the relationship between prescriptions of gender appropriate behaviour and the societal structures and processes that generate gender specific disorders, such as PMS, in western societies. The analysis demonstrates that the signs and symptoms of PMS that have been consistent over time, such as aggression, clearly identify the norm that has been transgressed, that of 'placid femininity'. But symptoms that emerge at a specific time, such as food craving, reflect the changing norms of gendered appropriate behaviour such as self-surveillance in relation to ideals of beauty, self-control and new constructions of health. The central thread connecting all these sites of analysis is the primacy given to female biology. This study argues that as a disorder located within time and place PMS is an inheritor of historical assumptions about the essential nature of women, that is women are a homogenous group that are defined and controlled by their natural reproductive potential. Therefore, the discourses of PMS have the potential to revitalise the notion that for women 'anatomy is destiny'.