“Maybe I am dead and this is hell,” thinks American comedian and writer Samantha Irby upon waking in a hotel room in Texas, drenched in a “congealed pool of blood so deep you’d need galoshes to wade through it” (106). In her essay “Hysterical!” from her 2020 collection titled Wow, No Thank You, Irby outlines a nightmarish scene in which her “hostile, elusive, disrespectful” menstrual experiences collide with the polite protocols of the hospitality industry (104). During the night, she bled everywhere, straight through her underwear, pajamas, and the starched white sheets of a deluxe queen bed.
Trapped in a small room with limited spare attire and irredeemably soiled bedclothes, with the housekeeping team audibly making their way down the hallway, Irby panics. She strips the soaked bed and peels off her ruined sleepwear, destroying the borrowed towels as she tries to scrub away evidence of an unexpected bodily disaster. The prose turns oozy and violent when she reimagines the room as a crime scene and then as a surgical ward. Still awash in blood and embarrassment, Irby wads up the linens into a “uterine-lining burrito,” and she bolts (107). She leaves a stack of cash for the hotel employees next to a note that reads “I apologize for my body.”
As much as “Hysterical!” brilliantly uses humor to catalogue one woman’s journey from menarche (confusing) to an endometrial ablation (relieving), the essay also probes how our affective understandings of period gore reinforce the gendered dynamics of domestic labor. In the hotel room incident, Irby is notably concerned about how this episode will impact hotel staff. She feels deep shame and guilt at the thought of others encountering and having to address her bodily fluids. Simultaneously, through the merged images of a hotel guest menstruating and of an employee tending to the mess, “previously ‘private’” affairs become “absorbed into social and market spheres,” as political scholar Joan Tronto writes in her theory of care ethics (151). In their work, maids—who are nearly always women—must breach the once-confidential spaces of the bedroom and the body that has occupied it. For Irby, the nightmare is not only that she is in pain but that her intimate discomfort will become public knowledge, a chore assigned to a stranger.
Irby’s essay is largely about the mortification and loneliness many girls and women still feel regarding menstrual experiences. Forget achieving the “exciting life of a woman in a Kotex ad”—Samantha Irby just wishes her parents, teachers, or doctors could have helped her pick the right hygiene products or receive earlier and more effective medical attention for severe menorrhagia (109). But inadvertently, her attention to her deep sensation of humiliation at an Intercontinental in Austin illuminates where women’s health experiences intersect with the performance of domestic jobs.
Drafted in 2020 as a composite and global call to action, The Care Manifesto suggests a connection between hands-on care work and “the most seemingly repellent or shameful aspects of people’s mortal, embodied selves” (27). The authors argue that tasks viewed as disgust-inducing often “reinforce[s] the notion of the inferiority” of such laborers “because they are thought to be more suited to handling ‘abject’ flesh, the sign of our inescapable corporeal existence and hence of our mortality” (27-28). In other words, interactions with bodily fluids reanimate our awareness of human vulnerability, and associations with both degradation and feminine embodiment cause this kind of work to be chronically undervalued and underpaid (24). Just as the personal shame of residing in an “unruly body” compels Samantha Irby to hide her stained bedclothes as best she can, so too does her (less conscious) shame for the hotel workers prompt her to leave extra money to pay for the extra cleanup.
After reading “Hysterical!,” I wonder about the political value of envisioning a world where we might all be released from the historical grip of such guilt. Does the fact that Irby finds solace in reading similar tales of accidentally bloodied hotel rooms on Reddit mean that alternative forums and the open acknowledgment of universal bodily grossness might transform our norms? How might a caretaking movement enable us to view menstrual discharge as ordinary and the changing of bed linens as important, dignified work?
Perhaps validation from online threads, better pay for domestic workers, and more attention to beds are good starting places, actually. In her book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, writer and activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha describes speaking with a respite agency representative who informed her: “Many people find they have an easier time with someone who is being paid well to do the work” of cooking and cleaning rather than repeatedly asking friends to provide the missing support (39). Piepzna-Samarasinha identifies that “shame [and] lack of access to the web” is partly what keeps her chronically ill friends from knowing about and seeking such care. Shame here helpfully captures both the grief of needing this kind of help and the sense of commiseration with those who would provide it. Irby’s hotel scene stretches to illustrate the felt duality of such sentiments, and Piepzna-Samarasinha notes their sociopolitical entanglement.
An image toward the end of Care Work offers a more hopeful vision of what a feminist approach to occupying a bed with a (messy, unruly, bloody, tired, etc.) body could look like. Piepzna-Samarasinha writes:
I am a chronically ill queer of color artist, and so much of my time is spent in bed. I joke that my bed, heaped with cushions, is my office, my world headquarters. My life is arranged around my bed. There is good art to look at, a window, my vibrator plugged in, a stack of books within easy reach. I lie in it thinking of all my other crip poet friends who spend most of their days in bed too. Draped in pillows, red and plum sheets, surrounded by good art to look at, curtained by plum sari fabric. This is my place of power, the fulcrum, the place everything emerges from. I dream here. I write here. (112)
While this paragraph depicts a private home, it also recognizes the collective fullness of life that happens in our beds. Whether someone is disabled or not, the bedroom functions as a space of painful and pleasurable physicality, of separation from and engagement with the public world, of time’s passing and of time’s slowing… Reading Care Work, we can appreciate that our most private experiences often unfold in remarkably similar settings, settings that are sometimes, as with hotel rooms, literally shared. By noticing how these intimate sites get rendered falsely and exploitatively emblematic of nonproductivity and of the demands of furtive cleaning and maintenance, we can make visible the essential work of bodily and spatial care, and especially as experienced and performed by women.
To embrace the resistant possibilities of an observable bedroom and of the occasionally sullied sheets is to concede that our domestic and economic worlds now bleed into each other (pun intended). As Samantha Irby shows us, and as care theorists unpack for us, the plight of housekeeping is bound up in our acceptance of “corporeal surprise” (Irby 106) and our joint liberation from the shame of both. Joan Tronto insists that such attentiveness and solidarity will help transform the private, gendered task of care into a collective, democratic practice. It’s worth noting, too, per Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, that richly colored sheets in red and plum would refuse to show bloodstains.
Works Cited:
The Care Collective. Andreas Chatzidakis, Jamie Hakim, Jo Littler, Catherine Rottenberg, and Lynn Segal, editors. The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence. Verso, 2020.
Irby, Samantha. Wow, No Thank You: Essays. Vintage/Penguin Random House, 2020.
Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi. Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018.
Tronto, Joan. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. Routledge, 1993.
Image Credit:
Rippl-Rónai, József. Woman in Bed, 1891. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rippl_Woman_in_Bed_1891.jpg
