Painfully Periodic

A Collective Memoir of Menstrual Pain

Painfully Periodic is a web platform that invites menstruating people to visualize and describe their menstrual experiences, especially of discomfort and pain, through engaging poll interfaces. Answers are anonymously aggregated and transformed into interactive visualizations that depict similarity and variability in menstrual pain.

The project aims to help menstruating people asynchronously and anonymously archive experiences of menstrual pain as visual and verbal memoir-data visualization.

Given the context in which menstrual pain is known to be exceedingly pervasive and disruptive to people’s lives, this thesis aims to facilitate the menstruating community to develop a picture of the large variability of the experience, introspect on undue normalization or under-reporting, and co-create a digital resource and language to talk about it.

At the same time, this resource hopes to enable better advocacy – an urgent call for more research and funding for a deeper understanding of the etiology and pathophysiology of menstrual pain, an endeavor that will not only alleviate the experience of debilitating period-related pain, but also help distinguish it from other dangerous and life-threatening conditions that also induce pain.

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The project utilizes the textural experimental potential of computational art to map subjective experiences both quantitatively and qualitatively.

The act of answering the question hopes to give voice to menstruating people where their experience is often dismissed by social systems.

The transformation of responses into visuals hopes to enable an exploration of similar and differing experiences or perspectives, and lead to introspection and asynchronous discourse.

The website hopes to live on as a growing evolving imperfect incomplete personal collective community-moderated archive.

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