Gender Display in Sensorial Terms. Reflections on Menstruating Bodies in a Group of Mexican Girls

This paper aims to draw the way in which a group of girls from Mexico City have used the body senses (in particular, smell and sight) in the gender display that they carry out in front of their peers, regarding the menstruation as a significant event during puberty. The work will address three specific aspects: a. the sensory and cognitive meaning attributed to the menstruation by the adolescents, as well as the main sources of information on this subject (peers, relatives, teachers, etc.) b. the “corporal techniques” (Marcel Mauss and Pierre Bourdieu) that implies a menstruating body and against which the adolescents are interpolated during their interactions with their peers, within the framework of their friendly and familiar relations and c. the type of gender display (Goffman) that entails such techniques during interactions. Altogether, such an analysis will allow me to reconstruct significant aspects of perception schemes (both sensorial and cognitive terms) around menstruation as well as the daily practices and strategies with which this group of girls faces this phenomenon, as well as relevant analytical keys for the study of sensitivity in the "order of interaction" (Goffman). It is worth noting that this paper is part of a wider research: my doctoral thesis entitled "Affectivity and gender asymmetries. On the subject of the learning of the identities and modes of relation between the sexes in the family dynamics whose main objective is to analyze the familiar socialization modes that contribute to the definition of gender identities in a group of adolescents of middle class in the city of Mexico.