Athletic Women’s Experiences of Amenorrhea: Biomedical Technologies, Somatic Ethics and Embodied Subjectivities

Abstract

Taking inspiration from Nikolas Rose (2007a, 2007b) and feminist new materialists, this paper creates space for athletic women’s voices of their biological and social bodies, and particularly their interactions with the medical professions and biomedical technologies. Drawing upon interviews with 10 female athletes and recreational exercisers who have experienced amenorrhea as a result of their exercise and dieting practices, it reveals how these women, as ‘somatic subjects’, are “reformulating their own answers to Kant’s three famous questions—what can I know? What must I do? What may I hope?—in the age of the molecular biopolitics of life itself” (Rose 2007a, p. 257). In so doing, we see that not all women are docile bodies within such operations of medical power and knowledge, and the “somatic ethics” being practiced by athletic women diagnosed with amenorrhea vary considerably, ranging from rejection and resistance to acceptance of medical advice. Ultimately, this paper challenges scholars of the moving body to consider what the ‘biological turn in social theory’ might mean for our field, and our understandings of moving bodies beyond the biology/culture dualism.