Data Flows & Menstruation: How Users of Period Trackers Navigate the Datafication & Commodification of their Menstrual Cycles

Abstract

My PhD explores how users of cycle trackers access information about their menstrual cycles and how they understand and navigate data commodification in their everyday lives through a data justice approach. The commodification of user data is portrayed as an all-encompassing, totalising “version” of capitalism. By shifting the focus from the logic of data commodification to the ways in which people navigate this system, I contribute to a different understanding of how value is accrued from data in the digital economy. A focus on CTA users is especially useful because: first, the data these apps collect are more valuable than most user data; second, the bodies of people who menstruate have historically been controlled for in order to extract free reproductive labour. Guided by Participatory Action Research methodologies (PAR), I interviewed 30 app users in Vienna. Through a data justice lens, I introduce questions of power inequalities to discourses on privacy, moving beyond a focus on individual rights and ownership of data to address material aspects of and injustices built into data infrastructures. To do so, my PhD moves through three overarching and interconnected lines of inquiry. First, I ground my inquiry by analysing the context in which the datafication of menstrual cycles intervenes: how do people access knowledge and information about menstrual cycles. How is knowledge about menstruation shaped, controlled, and limited? I argue that menstrual knowledge is deeply shaped by ideas of normality, the imperative to conceal one’s menstrual status, and demands for menstrual management. I discuss how participants navigated these three factors to learn about their cycles. Second, I turn my attention to the use of CTAs. I investigate why and how participants find CTAs useful and essential, contributing a new understanding menstrual tracking through the lens of menstrual management. Simultaneously, I question what ways of knowing menstruation CTA data can provide users. I demonstrate that CTAs are designed for a cis-heterosexual user in monogamous relationships with a normative regular cycle and contribute a novel contextualisation of CTAs in the historical effort to make menstruation calculable and reproduction plan-able. I contribute insights into how the data- driven lens of menstruation and encoding of Norma’s cycle shape how participants track. Third, I pose two interconnected questions. How people encounter and navigate this system of data extraction in the context of their menstrual data? I argue that users strike a deliberate bargain whereby they exchange their data for a tool to manage menstruation. I argue that CTAs datafy and commodify users’ social reproductive work of managing menstruation. I contribute a different lens into how data capitalism is experienced and sustained through the lens of CTA users. Additionally, I ask how participants understand the value of the (menstrual) data they generate which are accumulated by CTAs? I argue that due to users’ experience of menstrual stigma and concealment, they assume data about menstruation to be of little to no interest in the context of data capitalism, contrary to how valuable menstrual data actually are.