Where Menstrual Education and Environmental Justice Converge

When discussed together, menstrual and socioenvironmental health often focus on questions of hygiene and risk management, centering the materialities, distribution, and disposal of menstrual products. The toxicity of disposable menstrual products has long been a matter of concern, with growing public attention to endocrine disruptors (EDs) accompanying the expansion of a marketplace for “eco-friendly” options. Critical menstrual scholars and activists have addressed the tendency to focus on products in menstrual health interventions as risking the reinforcement of welfarist attitudes and individualizing narratives of responsibility. Critiques of individualizing narratives are echoed in scholarship that conceptualizes EDs as industrial pollutants. In Latin America, a growing menstrual health movement is voicing this critique, while also situating menstruation within broader sociopolitical and environmental concerns. This article draws attention to how territorial framings of menstruation in Latin America are generating dynamic spaces to work with and through the tensions and potentialities of menstrual education and socioenvironmental justice. Examining how EDs are discussed in the menstrual education intervention of a community-based socioenvironmental program in coastal Colombia, the article demonstrates how Latin American decolonial menstrual health education approaches are advancing understandings of menstruation as a situated biopsychoecosocial process through which to address and redress broader structural violences.