Sangre sucia, cuerpo prescindible: análisis sobre la menstruación en mujeres habitantes de calle en la ciudad de Bogotá

Abstract

It is unquestionable that there are social categories that, when they intersect, contribute to building social identities, and create power, domination, and resistance relationships. This is the case of homeless women, in which bodies intersect categories such as gender, citizenship -and the exclusion of it- and the fact that they menstruate. The issue is that, independently, these categories have been understood by exclusion, contamination, and danger. Historically, menstrual blood has been related to impurity, diseases, and, in the end, to the private sphere. Homelessness, on the other hand, has meant the rejection and the exclusion of citizenship. When these categories conjugate, they make the bodies that experience them doubly contaminant, and, therefore, doubly transgressors. Because of it, this imbrication creates particular experiences and determines how women live and interact with menstruation departing from their alleged contamination, exclusion, and incoherence. Furthermore, it determines how institutional actors such as La Secretaría Distrital de Integración Social interacts with homeless women. Due to these differential conditions, the current investigation has as its main objective to analyze how homeless women of Bogotá city live their menstruation given their homelessness, gender, and condition of menstruating bodies. To do so, the question that is meant to be answered is: how do homeless women of Bogota city live their menstruation given their homelessness, gender, and condition of menstruating bodies?