Digital Humanities Working Group: Marina DiMarco
*Note: The venue for the DH Working Group has changed for Spring 2026. We will now be meeting in the DUC, Room 233, for all sessions until further notice.
The March session of the Digital Humanities Working Group of Spring 2026 will feature a talk by Prof. Marina DiMarco, Assistant Professor of Philosophy.
Title: Blood, Sweat, and Teams: Menstrual Surveillance and Workplace Wellness in Sport
Abstract: Menstrual cycle tracking is rapidly emerging as a promissory approach to managing and optimizing the female athlete at a variety of levels. Here, we analyze the emergence of menstrual cycle tracking as a form of both luxury surveillance and workplace biometric surveillance for the female athlete. We highlight how data production and menstrual management bring athletes – as precarious workers, reproductive bodies, and elite performers – under gendered surveillance and scrutiny. We further emphasize how menstrual tracking goes beyond other forms of commonly accepted workplace and athletic surveillance, becoming an extractive practice embraced as part of broader wellness and personal optimization. Menstrual tracking simultaneously supports commodification of menstrual cycle data and reductive narratives about its role as the foundation of women’s athletic performance, health, and wellbeing. We analyze four examples of companies promoting menstrual cycle tracking platforms that incorporates a team/coach/manager data sharing dashboard or functionality, ranging from general workplace wellness (Oura) to athlete-specific apps (FitRWoman, Wild.AI, Kynisca iHub) at various stages of development. Sport, as a highly gendered social and economic context, is a unique nexus for understanding how this form of workplace biometric surveillance intersects with multiple ongoing conversations about the power of information, extractive data collection, and the neoliberal pressures to always be optimizing, with uneven consequences for women and men. We argue that menstrual coaching platforms promise to empower athletes using the rhetoric of the feminist women’s health movement to frame managerial surveillance as a luxury product for elite and amateur athletes alike. We find deep tension between promises of empowerment offered to athletes and the possibilities for control and optimization used to advertise menstrual coaching platforms.
The session will take place on Friday March 20th from 11-12.30, in the DUC, Room 233. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A. Lunch will be provided.
If you plan to attend this session, please RSVP and provide your lunch order here.
The Digital Humanities Working Group working is a space for faculty and advanced graduate students to present works-in-progress for feedback before submitting their work to an external conference, journal or grant body. We also aim to create a regular community gathering space for researchers in the digital humanities across disciplines in Arts and Sciences. Scholars interested in any of the subfields of the digital humanities, including but not limited to humanities data analytics, cultural analytics, media studies, critical digital studies, critical data studies, and history of science and technology, are welcome to attend. The group consists of monthly meetings in which one or two faculty or grad students will present a current project. The working group is a cross-disciplinary intitative sponsored by the Transdisciplinary Institute in Applied Data Sciences and the Humanities Digital Workshop, with the support of Olin Library Data Services.
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If you have any questions, or if you are interested in presenting to the group, please email Claudia Carroll (claudiac@wustl.edu).