Apps for Monitoring Menstrual Cycles and Pregnancy: Body, gender, health and information technologies

Abstract

In this article, we discuss the relations between body, health, technologies and gender, based on an analysis of apps for monitoring menstrual cycles and pregnancy. Our central goal is to analyze, from a gender perspective, what bodies are constituted by the interfaces of these apps, and what types of data are produced in these environments. Articulated with feminist activisms concerning technologies, we propose an analysis of apps that address female reproductive health, in an effort to situate them in the context of expansion of information technologies applied to health and the monitoring of bodies (Lupton, 2014).

Apps; Menstrual Cycle; Pregnancy; Gender; Anthropology of Science and Technology