First name: Lucía
Last name: Cores Harg
Class Year: 2026
Advisor: John Durham Peters
Essay Abstract:
Contemporary menstrual products—including menstrual cups—are used within a culture of shame and concealment that undermines female agency and blunts ecological sensibilities. This thesis asks how menstrual cups, understood as media technologies, might instead help reconfigure menstrual imaginaries and practices toward feminist empowerment and environmental care. Bringing feminist technology studies, ecofeminism, and environmental media theory into conversation, I develop an interpretive analysis of menstrual cups. Building on Zoë Sofia’s work on container media, I contrast cups with disposable pads and tampons as media optimized for disappearance, and I argue that cups’ material affordances center contact with menstrual blood rather than its erasure—creating a foundation for the potentials I subsequently propose. Synthesizing empirical and theoretical literature, I map six feminist affordances—around bodily literacy, menstrual experience, timing-agency, shared knowledge, acceptance of the menstrual body, and creative uses of blood—and five environmental affordances—including reduced waste, disrupted vortices of forgetting, challenges to the Anthropocene sensorium, strengthened environmental self-identity, and deepened ecological sensibilities. Taken together, these contributions develop an explicitly eco-feminist interpretation of cups that foregrounds the overlap between feminist and environmental concerns. These eco-feminist potentials are neither automatic nor universal: they depend on discourse that frames cups as more than devices of perfect containment. By treating cups as eco-feminist media rather than niche hygiene products, this thesis offers a conceptual map for re-imagining menstrual technologies as leverage points in struggles for gender justice and sustainability.