Menstruation in the age of its technical reproducibility. Technology and the re/configuration of bleeding bodies.

I examine menstruation as a key site where bodies, technologies, and politics converge. In recent years, menstruation has gained unprecedented social visibility. Long regarded as a bodily fluid to be hidden or eliminated, it has become both a symbol of feminist activism and a site of market expansion. From debates on the “pink tax” and menstrual poverty to concerns about the environmental burden of disposable products, menstruation now stands at the center of discussions about climate justice, gender inequality, and economic valuation. At the same time, the FemTech industry has identified menstruation as a field of technological innovation. In addition to pads, tampons, and cups, new products and devices—such as cycle-tracking apps, menstrual discs, and even laboratory “menstruation machines”—are reshaping how menstruating bodies are managed. These technologies crystallize medical knowledge, entrepreneurial ambition, and activist demands. This trajectory leads to my overarching research question:

How are corporeal orders produced, stabilized, or transformed through menstrual technologies in technologized societies?

The Human in the Face of Technology: An Ethnography of Robotics.

My dissertation project explores how ideas and knowledges about “the human” are produced, negotiated, and stabilized in the field of robotics. I am interested in how engineers, scientists, and practitioners articulate what it means to be human while working on machines that are designed to move, sense, and act in the world. Rather than treating robots as merely technical artifacts, I approach robotics laboratories as spaces where cultural imaginaries, social norms, and technological practices intersect.

The project draws on both sociological practice theories and materialist feminist theories as crucial frameworks. These perspectives enable a nuanced analysis of how human and non-human elements—bodies, code, sensors, materials, experimental setups, and everyday routines—are entangled in the making of humanoid machines.

Through ethnographic fieldwork, including participant observation and in-depth interviews, I examine how boundaries between humans and non-humans are enacted, contested, and sometimes blurred. By following these boundary-making practices in situ, the project asks how contemporary robotics participates in reshaping notions of agency, relationality, and humanity itself.