The Everyday Self-tracking. Datafication of Menstrual Period

Digital self-tracking technologies are playing an increasingly role in everyday wellbeing. This contribution presents a theoretical and empirical analysis of one form of self-tracking technologies, that is menstrual period apps used to self-track and transform into data everyday practices and bodily functions (Lupton, 2016). Therefore, the contribution focus on self-tracking literature based on three principal critical approaches about the concept of data. The first one reads small data aggregated in big data like a kind of self-surveillance in order to manage and discipline citizens (Kitchin, 2014). The second one emphasises the awareness that data can produce in the users through a constant reflective self-tracking (Ruckenstein, Pantzar, 2015). The third one underlines new ways of participatory democracy by these technologies with the emergence of citizen-subject and citizen-science (Gabrys, 2014). Self-tracking technologies include the valorising not only of self-quantification and self-responsibility in the context of health promotion (Lalonde, 1974) and neoliberalism, but also of self-improvement and self-knowledge for a personal reflections and interactions (Ruckenstein, 2014). For these reasons, the empirical part focus on how the users use the apps for menstrual period and interpret the data produced through semi-structured interviews. The object is to explore the entanglement of women in self-tracking technologies used to manage an intimate aspect of their everyday life, and the process of reappropriation of the medical knowledges inscribed in the devices. Therefore, the women interviewed are not members of Quantified Self movement (QSm) (Wolf, 2010), since the objective is to explore what self-tracking means for users who don’t know QSm, while they are integrating it in private and intimate everyday routines and relationships (Pink, Fors, 2017). Analysis of the interviews comes to light a different gradation of expert knowledge reappropriation inscribed in self-tracking apps. In this regard, I seek to unfold how the users construct relationships with the digital technologies, that is whether they relate to them as an unproblematic black box ready to use, or whether they take for granted the expert knowledge inscribed in the device, rather than they tinker with artifacts that are problematized and reconfigured.