It has been argued that more-than-human design can benefit from feminist intersectional critique by asking
what human is being decentered and what other relations are brought forward [
55]. In our work, we bring forward the non-human species involved in human menstrual care, and in this process the menstruating body could be argued to be decentered. However, rather than simply decentered, we reconfigure the body as more-than-human. Here, materiality and transcorporeality are key to the more-than-human body: in understanding the multiple non-human bodies —organic and inorganic organisms— that our bodies are part of, relate to, leak into, and absorb from. This builds on the feminist posthumanist argument, that it is crucial that we re-situate our transcorporeal embodiment through how we relate and become in a more-than-human world [
3].
Feminist posthumanist scholar Rosi Braidotti argues that the pioneers of post-anthropocentric practices are feminists, especially ecofeminists, Indigenous feminists, and LGBTQ+ theorists, who have extensively theorized and experienced what it means to be excluded, decentered from and considered less-than the dominant norm of the universal "Man", who has been central in humanism, modernity and the enlightenment [
20]; and in extension to that design and HCI [
82]. Feminists trouble the Western binary of man/woman, mind/body, and culture/nature, where the former has been privileged in Western cultures. However, as Indigenous feminist scholar Zoe Todd reminds the Euro-Western posthuman academy, Indigenous scholars have been teaching and writing about human-animal relations for decades [
100], and as Sundberg argues, the split between nature and culture is not universal, as some posthumanist theory seems to assume [
96]. In our research, we see this for instance in Kimmerer’s Indigenous teachings and uses of mosses [
60] and the online communities we got inspired by to design for menstruation-soil relations. Yet, with the Western colonial nature-culture distinction, sexualized and racialized people have been positioned closer to nature and non-human living beings, and ecofeminists argue that the same power structures —sexism, heteronormativity, racism, colonialism, and ableism— that have led to the exploitation of women, LGBTQ+ folks, Indigenous people and people of color, have also led to the exploitation of other-than-human species and the extraction of natural resources [
54]. Our design work and workshops brought forward conversations on these intersecting harmful tensions of menstruating human bodies, plastics pollution, composting and soil fertility. While it could be argued that such a menstruation-soil perspective risks reinforcing patriarchal and colonial associations of women as closer to the, perceived, emotional and unpredictable natural world, and men as closer to reason, culture, and humanity, we argue that what this perspective, a feminist posthuman one, is precisely doing, is affirming the close entanglement of all these entities, therefore breaking the idea that such a dualism exist. Posthuman feminism brings the genealogy of feminist theory and intersectionality in relation to posthumanism, insisting on interdependency and differences in more-than-human relations, as poetically noted by Braidotti:
"the inextricability of social, technological and environmental factors reveals the fact that ’we’ are in this together although we are not one and the same" [
20]. The project does not come without tensions and risks, such as the one above and ones related to the scale and safety of biomaterials for intimate care. As such, the project opens up ethical discussions, not only about the practices we suggest but also concerning the scale of current harmful ones. These speculative ethics [
16] come to the surface by attending to neglected, excluded, and devalued relations of intimate care on a more-than-human scale, hereby making us care for personal everyday doings that, although they are a collective affair, have been collectively neglected and instead led to personal stigma and plastic waste.