Chris Bobel is Professor and Chair of Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Chris finds the body, especially the body on the margins—a rich site where social norms, cultural anxieties and political agendas come to life. As a scholar of social movements, she is curious about how feminist thinking becomes feminist doing at the most intimate and immediate levels. At the intersection of these interests lies menstrual activism —a research and advocacy focus that has sustained Chris’s interest for nearly two decades.
 
Chris is the author of The Managed Body: Developing Girls and Menstrual Health in the Global South (Palgrave Macmillan), New Blood: Third Wave Feminism and the Politics of Menstruation (Rutgers University Press), The Paradox of Natural Mothering (Temple University Press), and the co-edited collections (with Samantha Kwan) Embodied Resistance: Breaking the Rules, Challenging the Norms (Vanderbilt University Press) and Body Battlegrounds: Transgressions, Tensions and Transformations (Vanderbilt University Press) and the forthcoming (and first ever) Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies (Palgrave Macmillan). Chris is past president of the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research and is often consulted by the mainstream media about the rapidly growing global menstrual activist movement. She is at work on a new ethnographic project exploring contemporary activism inspired by grief and trauma. She has been quoted in publications such as The New York Times, The Huffington Post, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Time, NPR, USA Today, The Atlantic, El Mundo, Agence France-Presse, and the Associated Press.