Periodizing Players’ Lives: Enacting Gender and Science through Menstrual Cycle Syncing in Elite Women’s Football

• In Event: 50462 - Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 5: Femininities

Abstract

After the United States Women’s National Soccer Team made headlines globally for implementing a “groundbreaking” menstrual cycle tracking infrastructure into players’ lives on the road to their 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup victory, the use of menstrual cycle tracking technologies among elite professional women’s sports teams throughout the United States and Europe has proliferated. “Cycle syncing” is the practice of aligning the different phases of the menstrual cycle to one’s lifestyle, adjusting diet, exercise, work, and sleep to help women to “optimize” their embodied experiences of the hormonal fluctuations associated with the menstrual cycle. How has cycle syncing become the gold standard for athlete performance training and health management in professional women’s football? I will investigate how players and coaches construct social meaning out of scientific knowledge about gender and bodies and enact these meanings through different practices, with a focus on cycle syncing as a case study. Through narratives from athletes, I hope to further understand players’ embodied experiences of living, playing, and training under cycle syncing routines. I will also ask how coaches and researchers operationalize this approach, given the absence of significant research in favor of its benefits and rise of research suggesting the menstrual cycle has no impact on performance. How do they reckon with these contradictions, and what anecdotal or lay evidence in their own lives continues to motivate their championing of cycle syncing as an approach? What beliefs about gender, bodies, menstruation, and the imaginary of “the female athlete” are true for these actors, and how do they play a role in their embodiment or implementation of cycle syncing? This paper will investigate both what these actors see as the stakes of this cycle syncing, as well as the embodied realities of enacting this practice in their own lives and performance environments.

Author

• Cassidy Gabriel, Yale University