Sports & Society Reading Group: Discussion with Dr. Marina DiMarco

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Dr. Marina DiMarco

Sports & Society Reading Group: Discussion with Dr. Marina DiMarco

The Sports & Society Reading Group is thrilled to host Dr. Marina DiMarco.

Dr. DiMarco will be sharing work in progress for us to discuss! Here’s how she describes the project, which is co-authored with Katharine Lee, Madeleine Pape, Abigail Higgins, Marion Boulicault, and Sarah Richardson:

"Actors attuned to the “unique" health and performance needs of women athletes increasingly emphasize female technology, or FemTech, as a way to empower athletes, mitigate injury risk, and maximize performance. Of particular interest are digital menstrual cycle tracking apps with coaching platforms, where team staff can view and make decisions based on menstrual cycle data and predictions. Menstrual coaching apps advertise welcome investments in women's sport and solutions to a variety of familiar epistemic injustices: the distributive epistemic injustice of a sport science research program skewed toward male athletes, the hermeneutical injustice of taboos around menstruation, and the testimonial injustice of women not being believed when they report symptoms. Building on feminist critiques of FemTech and critical analyses of digital menstrual tracking as workplace biometric surveillance, we argue that, in fact, menstrual coaching apps likely exacerbate epistemic injustices while accelerating managerial control over women athletes as workers.”

 

Marina DiMarco is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and affiliate faculty to the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is also a member of the GenderSci Lab at Harvard. Marina is a philosopher of the health and life sciences whose work focuses on relationships between biology and feminism, including sex concepts in science, and ‘femtech,’ or female technology markets.

Please contact Noah Cohan (ncohan@wustl.edu) for more information and a copy of the excerpted reading materials.