Controlling Their Own Bodies: Adolescents Interpreting Menstruation Knowledge and Appropriating Technologies in the 1970s–1980s, South Korea

Abstract: This article explores the shift in ideas and knowledge of menstruation and the ways young women dealt with menstruation in the 1970s–1980s in South Korea, with a focus on menstrual technology and ordinary women as users of the technology. Using the concept of affordance of technology and its mechanism, it traces more diverse and creative ways in which women have been involved with menstrual technologies and captures intersections between the histories of menstruation, contraception, and family planning programs under Cold War politics in East Asia. This article reveals that, in these intersections, adolescent female South Koreans chose menstrual technology and responded to demands and requests from the technology based on their own interpretations of menstrual knowledge and their menstruating bodies in ways that differed from the state's, experts', and manufacturers' expectations.