Bloody Design: Locating Menstruation in a Design Studio.

Under the current political leadership, India introduced the Menstrual Hygiene Management National Guidelines 2015, set against a broader landscape of menstrual policies across the Global South. This not only brings public focus to the re/productive body, but it inadvertently situates it in a new "menstrual hut," the public (school) toilet, amidst echoes of "women's" health and hygiene. The standardized and universalized toilet layout accompanies it. I argue that this spatializes menstruation, and the toilet is uncritically accepted as the site of technological and efficient management.

On one hand, architectural design pedagogy, when and if ever addressing the public toilet, has toed this line of efficiency, rendering the object/subject marginal. On the other, it's aversion to dirt and the matter of 'leaky' bodies, means menstruation has barely, if at all, entered architectural pedagogical imagination.

This paper investigates what it means to teach and design public infrastructure through a menstrual lens by specifically working with and on the site of a practically defunct public toilet situated in a marketplace in Sonipat, Haryana upon which a diverse group of bodies, many of whom are socially and economically marginalized, are dependent. This (annual) project is part of a mandatory design atelier, focussed on the question of method.

Drawing upon Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s “feminist solidarity model,” (Mohanty, 2003) wherein students work to unpack the implications of a national policy against the micropolitics of this particular site and project, I attempt to address how feminist pedagogy in the design studio may trouble the otherwise bracketed understanding of menstruation which not only interiorizes and homogenizes menstruators while rendering their bodies public, but extend this to how marginal bodies, matter and processes may be collaboratively recognized and sites designed as places that foreground menstrual equity, social justice and empowerment which is situated and specific.