Menstruation in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility: Technology and the Re/Configuration of Bleeding Bodies

• Applicant: Hannah Link
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 573942679

In recent years, menstrual blood has gained significant public visibility on an international scale. What was long considered a private, undesirable, and concealable bodily fluid has now become a symbol of contemporary feminist movements. At the same time, menstrual blood continues to be subject to routinized practices of concealment in everyday life. It thus moves within a tension between political visibility and technological control: on the one hand, it is aestheticized, staged, and publicly discussed; on the other, it is mechanically contained, datafied, and thereby simultaneously (re)invisibilized by a range of technologies. In this context, the project focuses on so-called menstrual technologies - technological artefacts designed to intervene in or process menstrual blood: by translating it into data through tracking apps; by mechanically collecting it through cups, discs, tampons, or pads; or by simulating it in medical laboratories. These technologies are inseparably linked to everyday practices of menstrual management and function as central elements within broader societal hygiene regimes. The project conceptualizes technologies both as crystallization points and as active agents of social ordering. They condense social norms, cultural meanings, and material practices, while simultaneously shaping them. The project follows a socio-material understanding of technology, in which technologies are not only socially constructed, but also actively contribute to the production, stabilization, and transformation of social orders (Haraway 1985; Latour 1992). Using menstrual technologies as a case in point, the project examines how somatic orders are constituted, maintained, or transformed in technologized societies. Methodologically, it draws on a material-discursive ethnography developed by the applicant, which combines ethnographic observation with focused analysis of the material and technical dimensions of artefacts. This approach enables an understanding of technologies not only as carriers of meaning and practice, but also as material co-producers of the body. The study centers on three case studies: 1) the menstruation tracking app Flo, 2) the analog menstrual disc and 3) the experimental menstrual simulation device Evatar, developed at the Draper Lab, University of Illinois. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and analysis of technical artifacts, the project investigates how menstrual technologies materialize, structure, and reconfigure bodies and bodily functions.

• DFG Programme: WBP Fellowship
• International Connection: Sweden
• Host: Professorin Dr. Cecilia Asberg