https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i3.119
Blood and Burden: Menstrual Stigma and Intellectual Disability in Aparna Singh’s “Death Wish”
GOWRI SREENIVAS
Research Scholar
Department of English
Maharaja’s College (Autonomous), Ernakulam
DR. REKHA KARIM
Associate Professor of English
Maharaja’s College (Autonomous), Ernakulam
Abstract: This paper examines the intersection of intellectual disability and menstrual stigma in Aparna Singh’s “Death Wish,” a chapter from the short story collection Periodic Tales (2022). Through the figure of Saumi, a twenty-five-year-old intellectually disabled woman raised by a single father and subsequently placed in an understaffed foster care facility, Singh constructs a narrative that exposes the compounding oppressions borne by disabled menstruating women within familial and institutional structures in India. Drawing on Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s concept of misfitting, the paper argues that Saumi’s body is rendered perpetually incompatible with every environment it inhabits—domestic, institutional, and cultural—not through personal failing but through the systematic refusal of those environments to accommodate non-normative embodiment. Complementing this framework, Johnston-Robledo and Chrisler’s theory of menstrual stigma illuminates how Saumi’s intellectual disability denies her the menstrual socialization, bodily literacy, and communal support that might otherwise partially mitigate the shame and secrecy culturally imposed on menstruating bodies. Michel Foucault’s biopolitical framework further reveals how the foster care home manages Saumi as a population to be contained rather than a person deserving dignity. Together, these frameworks demonstrate that Singh’s narrative is not merely a portrait of individual suffering but a structural critique of whose bodies are deemed worthy of care.
Keywords: Intellectual Disability, Menstrual Stigma, Misfitting, Biopower
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