Berkley Conner is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication Studies on the Rhetoric, Culture, Engagement track. She studies rhetorics of health and medicine, specializing in menstruation discourses. Her dissertation deploys rhetorical historiography to trace biopolitical strategies of menstrual containment between the 1870s and 1970s. She attends to moments of medical history, contingency, and shifts in the meaning and struggle over expertise of menstrual care to argue that menstrual containment is tethered to and co-constitutes gender, race, and nation. Her project highlights menstrual politics as a central, yet underexamined, dimension of reproductive justice. When she’s not researching, she’s watching movies and TV and defending her Big Grove Oscar’s ballot champion title.

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