Period Sex: Mediated Unruliness in Rachel Bloom’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

Abstract

Rachel Bloom rose to prominence in the early 2010s through her YouTube channel, racheldoesstuff, where she posted music videos like, “Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury” and “Pictures of Your Dick.” Bloom’s skill in satirizing gendered and sexual conventions is also present in the television show that she co-created and stars in, Crazy Ex Girlfriend. The show charts the journey of Rebecca who moves from New York to West Covina in pursuit of Josh Chan, her ex-boyfriend from fifteen years ago. Much like Bloom’s self-created content, Crazy Ex Girlfriend, challenges romantic and sexual conventions through musical comedy. In this essay, I analyze the representation of the unruly and bleeding body in the song, “Period Sex” which was banned by the CW and later posted on Bloom’s YouTube channel. The song exists in a liminal space between Bloom’s own genre of self created content and the larger politics of the CW which banned “Period Sex” from appearing on the show.

Keywords:

• Body politics
• sexuality
• unruliness
• feminist media studies
• Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
• Rachel Bloom

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hannah Meyer

Hannah Meyer received her Bachelor of Arts in Theatre and English from Muhlenberg College where she received highest honors for her thesis, “Witnessing Bodies in Crisis Violence & Spectatorship in the Work of Sarah Kane, Marina Abramović and Ron Athey.” She has presented at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Undergraduate Conference as well as the Lehigh Valley Women and Gender Studies Conference. She would like to thank Dr. Elizabeth Nathanson for her support with this project.