A room of one’s own? Period-trackers as private scopes to escape the stigma of menstruation

Why do women use period-trackers when they could just as well use a calendar to keep track of their menstrual cycle? What does a period-tracker provide other than a digital management tool and a more natural approach to family planning? With the intensive growth of technologies to measure various aspects of our health an increasing number of women are embracing apps for tracking their female cycle. While constructing new mediated relationships with their menstruating bodies these women also produce valuable data for the tech industry – and in that sense become prosumers. Questions of privacy and data ownership surface: Who produces the data, profits from the data and owns the data? However, the benefits of using a period-tracker seem to surpass the fear and potential risk of losing control over sensitive data – as it appears that the app offers a private room to escape the stigma around periods. Based on interviews with Danish women using period-trackers this talk seeks to explore and discuss these intersections of privacy, datafied bodies and menstrual stigma.

Bio: Amanda Karlsson is a PhD scholar from Institute of Communication & Culture at Aarhus University, part of the STS group and member of digitalsociety.dk and datalab.au.dk. She is currently a visiting research scholar at Department of Digital Humanities, Kings College.