Materializing, Learning and Controlling: An Analysis of the Agential Capacities of  Period Tracking with Apps

Materializing, Learning and Controlling:

An Analysis of the Agential Capacities of

Period Tracking with Apps

Research Master's in Media Studies

Victoria Andelsman Álvarez

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ... 1

Abstract ... 2

Chapter 1 Introduction ... 3

Chapter 2 Literature review ... 8

Theoretical framework ...8

Previous literature ...11

Self tracking ...11

Period-tracking apps ...14

Chapter 3 Materializing ... 17

How Things Come to Matter ...18

Not Just a Period ...19

Sequence of phases ...21

Intervals ...22

Conclusion ...25

Chapter 4 Learning ... 28

Perceptive Capacities and Embodied Knowledge ...29

To learn to be affected ...31

In loop: feeling, teaching and verifying ...33

Lessons learned: when the tutor becomes redundant ...36

Conclusion ...37

Chapter 5 Controlling ... 40

The Menstruating Body: Between Care and Control ...40

Exerting Control vs. Feeling in Control ...44

Anticipating ...45

Planning and avoiding ...46

Experimenting ...48

Conclusion ...49

Chapter 6 Conclusion ... 51

Acknowledgements

The first interview for this thesis took place in an almost empty café on the 11th of March of 2020. Joyce1 and I sat less than a meter away, each holding our precious bottles of hand sanitizer. That same week physical isolation measures were brought in in the Netherlands and by the 13th all the interviews had been re-scheduled online.

I am, therefore, especially indebted to the amazing participants of this study who were so generous with their time in the midst of the Covid-19 outbreak in the Netherlands. Thank you for allowing me into your homes via video call to discuss period-tracking apps when we were all going through such strange and uncertain times. I oftentimes get asked how I gained your trust, but the truth is I was inspired by your openness and eagerness to talk about a topic that has been, for too long, hidden. I am also grateful to my supervisor, Misha Kavka, who had the challenging task of supporting not only me but also all my classmates during these difficult times. Thank you for the patient guidance and advice which always made me feel more confident in my work and encouraged me to take my analysis a little further.

I would also like to say a heartfelt thank you to my parents. Mom, for trying to understand new materialism, STS and feminism, all in one go, during our never-ending calls. Thank you for transmitting me your love for knowledge and critical reasoning. Dad, for your confidence in me and for reminding me that even hard-working people need to take a break or go for a walk sometimes.

To my safety net in Amsterdam, for being my source of happiness and comfort. To Marco, for keeping me fed and sane. Thank you for being there when I needed you, and for knowing when it was best not to be around. To Ketaki, for being my family away from home and teaching me that there is (almost) nothing that a steamy plate of dal and a conversation with a friend cannot solve.

To my friends at UvA without whom I would not have made it through my master’s degree! Darsana, for your (surprisingly) kind words, our early morning conversations and your weather reports from India, which helped me get out of bed and seize the day. Jueling, for the dinner recipes and the stimulating questions about our love for technology. To Zhen and Ouej, for their words of encouragement during this very turbulent academic year. Finally to Layal, for being one of the most loving persons I know and believing in me even when I did not.

Abstract

This thesis explores the agential capacities that arise in period tracking with apps, paying particular attention to the ways in which these are distributed among different human and nonhuman actants. Drawing from Science and Technology Studies and feminist new materialism, the discussion is underpinned by an understanding of agency as the relational capacities distributed across assemblages of diverse bodies, forces, signs and affects (Barad, 2007). The analysis is based on thirteen semi-structured interviews with period-tracking app users living in The Netherlands, aged 24 to 38. The discussion is structured under three key agential capacities – materializing, learning and controlling – that emerged from the analysis of the interview transcripts. First, I discuss how different articulations between users and period tracking apps give rise to diverse materializations of cycles. Second, self-knowledge was identified as a key affective force enabled by period tracking with apps. Remarkably, the sense-making practices involved in app-assisted period tracking demands a particular kind of ‘learning’ that involves developing bodily awareness through the conjoining of the body with digital artefacts. Lastly, this study finds that these technologies are perceived by users as allowing them to take “control” over their (unruly) bodies, allowing them to anticipate, plan around and experiment with their cycles and (pre)menstrual changes. This paper draws on these findings to reflect on how tracing the entangled material agencies that emerge in situated practices provides a nuanced perspective on period tracking with apps.

Keywords: Agency, Bodies, Feminist New Materialism, Menstrual Cycles, Period-tracking Apps,

Chapter 1 Introduction

“It is like my friend for periods!”, Agne said about her period-tracking app and started laughing. We were discussing her use of the app Clue and she was telling me about how she usually consults it when she is worried something might be “wrong” with her body. “It is calming”, she said, because the app tells her that everything is “probably fine”. In Agne’s brief fragment, and throughout my interviews with period-tracking app users, menstrual trackers emerge as intimate relations calming and comforting users while helping them monitor their cycles. Agne’s experience of using a period tracker is not an isolated one; in a time where life is life deeply entwined with (digital) media, sexual and reproductive activities and functions are increasingly experienced and configured via self-tracking technologies (Lupton, 2015). Period-tracking apps, that is, apps that map ovulation and menstrual cycles using various bodily indicators, are particularly popular within the fast-growing “femtech” market which could be worth US $50 million by 2025, according to a research report by Global Market Insights (Jaramillo, 2019; Swain & Ugalmugle, 2019). This thesis reflects on period-tracking app users’ experiences and how the practices involved in app-assisted period tracking give rise to more-than-human relationships and capacities.

In contrast to their increasing popularity among users, scholarly attention to period tracking with apps has been scarce. While a growing number of studies have researched the use of self tracking for health and exercising purposes few studies have focused on users’ deployment of apps that assist menstrual tracking (Kristensen & Ruckenstein, 2018; Lupton, 2016, 2019d; Neff & Nafus, 2016). The little research that exists on period tracking with apps has emphasized their risks – both in terms of privacy and pregnancy – or looked into how their interfacial regimes (re)produce normative portrayals of menstruating bodies (Epstein et al., 2017; J. Levy, 2018; Lupton, 2015). The few studies that do look into users’ practices have barely scratched the surface, employing quantitative methods to study users’ motivations, finding that people use period-tracking apps for varied reasons, including but not limited to remembering and predicting them (Rubinsky et al., 2018; Gambier-Ross et al., 2018; J. Levy & Romo-Avilés, 2019).

What is missing in the existing literature is an analysis that captures the relationship between the apps’ materiality and (human) agency. Drawing on science and technology studies (STS) and feminist new materialist literature, this thesis explores the agential capacities and relational connections generated through app-assisted period tracking. Specifically, the thesis asks, what agential capacities emerge in period tracking with apps and how are they distributed among the multiple (human and nonhuman) actants involved? Moreover, what relational connections do people establish with and through period-tracking apps? Using the theoretical framework as a springboard to identify themes in the empirical data, the discussion below is structured under three key agential capacities that emerged

articulations between users and period-tracking apps give rise to diverse materializations of cycles. Second, I explore how period tracking with apps gives rise to a learning process whereby users develop their ability to associate bodily processes and sensations to their cycle. Lastly, I describe how these technologies are perceived by users as allowing them to take “control” over their (unruly) bodies, allowing them to anticipate, plan around and experiment with their cycles and (pre)menstrual changes. Connecting all these findings is the fact that period-tracking apps function as affective mediators that enter in contact with a variety of entities and events, participating in a multiplicity of assemblages that go beyond the managing of periods.

Taken together, these findings have implications for the study of self tracking in general and the gendered dimensions of these practices in particular. First, the findings of this study complicate the common assumption that bodily quantification practices such as period tracking lead to an emphasis on data over feeling by showing how data and embodied feelings co-constitute each other. Moreover, it reveals that agency is distributed among human and nonhuman actants, demonstrating how even the most intimate practices, such as identifying bodily sensations or engaging in self-care, require “shared work” involving bodies, technologies and other material elements. Finally, since gendered realities such as the stigmatization of menstruating bodies are material-discursive formations, an approach inspired by feminist new materialism and STS allows me to attend to the processes and assemblages that enable such gendered realities to emerge, persist, and reproduce (Truman, 2020). By bringing in user experiences and practices, my thesis contributes a more nuanced perspective on period tracking and the monitoring of the menstruating body, demonstrating how in period tracking practices a thin line exists between self-surveillance and self-preservation, which is worth exploring through an attentiveness to the relational connections between human and nonhuman entities.

Methodology

To explore the agential capacities and relational connections that arise in app-assisted period tracking, thirteen in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with period-tracking app users living in the Netherlands. Participants’ ages ranged between 24 and 38. Five out of the thirteen participants were Dutch. The rest of the participants were from Malaysia, Romania, Lithuania, the Philippines, Argentina, Ireland, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Regarding the apps participants used, Clue was the most popular one, with 6 participants using it. Of the other seven participants, two used My Calendar and the rest used either Monthly Cycles, Period Tracker, Natural Cycles or FitrWoman (Table 1). Due to the Covid-19 crisis, only three of the interviews were conducted face-to-face and the rest were conducted online. The interviews took between 35 and 80 minutes, lasting an average of 55 minutes. I recorded, transcribed and securely saved the interviews. The transcripts and any other data were anonymized, and all the names used in this thesis are pseudonyms. The study had institutional research ethics approval.

ID Date Pseudonym Age range App Type of interview

E1 11/03/2020 Joyce 25-34 Monthly cycles Face to face

E2 13/03/2020 Surya 35-44 Period tracker Face to face

E3 13/03/2020 Elena 25-34 My Calendar Face to face

E4 14/03/2020 Agne 25-34 Clue Online

E5 15/03/2020 Eva 25-34 Clue Online

E6 15/03/2020 Lisa 25-34 My Calendar Online

E7 15/03/2020 Sam 25-34 Clue Online

E8 16/03/2020 Vanessa 35-44 Flo Online

E9 17/03/2020 Jori 25-34 Clue Online

E10 18/03/2020 Florencia 25-34 Clue Online

E11 18/03/2020 Blake 25-34 Clue Online

E12 20/03/2020 Cara 25-34 Natural Cycles Online

E13 20/03/2020 Hannah 25-34 FitrWoman Online

Table 1 Sample

I entered the field with some areas for observation in the form of an interview guide designed to elicit a conversation where participants would talk extensively about several topics, such as period-tracking apps’ affordances, uses and use scenarios. Individual interviews were chosen over other qualitative methods, such as focus-groups, due to the sensitive, and oftentimes hidden, nature of the topic (Hesse-Biber, 2013).2 Because the goal of this research was to look at the processes of period tracking and the meanings users attribute to them, a purposive sample was employed (Bryman, 2016). The participants were recruited through an online survey shared through multiple Facebook groups to ensure variety in the resulting sample.

The interviews involved two main stages. The first stage of the interviews consisted of open-ended questions about the participant’s use of period-tracking apps. In the second stage of the interview, the participants were invited to access their app and go through it with the researcher.3 Inspired by the walkthrough method, developed by Light et. al, and the media go-along method, this portion of the interview discussed users’ everyday engagement with the apps, focusing on the apps’ materiality and

2 Other ethnographic methods, such as participatory observation, were not available due to the deeply private and

affordances (Jørgensen, 2016; Light et al., 2016). 4 Participants were also presented with hypothetical scenarios and asked to describe the sequence of actions they would take in attempting to complete a specified task (e.g. “how would you log a new cycle?”).

Following Lupton and Maslen, transcripts were analyzed using an interpretive thematic analysis informed by the theoretical perspective described in detail in the next chapter (Braun & Clarke, 2006; Lupton & Maslen, 2018; Ryan & Bernard, 2003). To do so, I read through the transcripts repeatedly, drawing on the theoretical literature to pinpoint the relational connections, affective forces, and agential capacities that emerged in user accounts. The naming of like phenomena and practices as an expression of either materializing, learning or controlling, was the result of a two-step analytic process: first, interview data was broken down analytically, by examining and comparing it, to categorize it (Corbin & Strauss, 1990). Through this interpretative process events, actions, practices and feelings were given conceptual labels (such as “finding patterns”, “noticing” or “planning”) which were then grouped and turned into the more abstract categories of materializing, learning and controlling. This second stage of the process, sometimes referred to as focused coding, served to discover not only the most common codes but also the most relevant ones for the research question (Bryman, 2016). This stage of coding required “decisions about which initial codes make the most analytic sense to categorize your data incisively and completely” (Charmaz, 2006, p. 57). The transcripts were then re-examined to test the utility of the tripartite classification of agential capacities, comprised of both native categories (such as “control”) and analyst constructed typologies (such as “materializing”). Consequently, every concept discovered in the research process earned its way into the three main categories by repeatedly being present in interviews and helping to respond the research question.

Thesis outline

The overall aim of this thesis is to illuminate agential forces and relational connections generated with and through humans’ entanglements with period-tracking apps. Using verb-based categories to illustrate the enactments and doings of more-than-human assemblages, this thesis finds that the practices involved in app-assisted period tracking give rise to three fundamental capacities: materializing, learning and controlling. The first chapter of this thesis sets out the theoretical framework and reviews the existing literature on app-assisted self tracking and period tracking. The next three chapters comprise the empirical findings of the thesis, each focusing on a key agential capacity that emerges through period tracking with apps. Chapter 3, entitled “Materializing,” expands on scholarship discussing the relationship between (female) embodiment, self-tracking apps and quantification by looking at how cycles are brought into being through the practices and affordances involved in period

4 In preparation for each of the interviews, I downloaded each of the users’ apps to get a sense of their interfacial

tracking with apps. The measuring practices involved in app-assisted period tracking, this chapter argues, materialize the seemingly invisible, untraceable aspects of one’s body to the user, bringing the cycle into being in a more systematic way, as either a sequence of phases or an interval. While supporting ideals of corporeal transparency and normative understandings of what constitutes a “normal” body, the agential capacities opened up bring the interior of the body into the world of actionable practices. Chapter 4 focuses on how learning emerges as a key agential capacity of the period tracking assemblage. Learning through period-tracking, this chapter argues, is a process that expresses how bodies “learn to be affected” when users develop the capacity to identify bodily sensations through the conjoining of the body with (digital) artefacts. The findings of this chapter demonstrate how period tracking requires that users inhabit their bodies, complicating the assumption that bodily quantification leads to an emphasis of data over embodied feeling (Lupton, 2013; Ruckenstein & Schüll, 2017). Finally, Chapter 5 tackles the question of whether, and in what ways, period-tracking apps help users “take control” of their bodies. It makes a distinction between the capacity to exert control and the capacity to feel in control, arguing that app-assisted period tracking gives rise to the later. Taken together, the chapters offer an overview of the various ways in which period tracking with apps gives rise to capacities to understand and manage the menstrual cycle. In the conclusion I draw on these findings to reflect on how mapping these emergent entangled agencies provides a more nuanced perspective on period tracking with apps.

Chapter 2 Literature review

Theoretical framework

This thesis draws from Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Feminist New Materialist literature, as articulated in the work of key scholars such as Karen Barad, Jane Bennet, Bruno Latour, John Law and Annemarie Mol, among others to illuminate the agential capacities and relational connections generated through app-assisted period tracking. The conceptual tools employed in this project can also be understood as partaking in what Law calls “material-semiotics”, a blanket term used to cover a range of nonhumanist approaches – from actor-network theory through feminist technoscience studies – that see every-thing, human or otherwise, as shaped in relations. This approach questions the boundaries between human and nonhuman, matter and discourse, exposing the practices through which these boundaries are constituted and (de)stabilized (Puar, 2012). Material-semiotics, Law explains, is not a unified theory but a “set of tools and sensibilities” that allows researchers to explore how the (social) world is “woven out of threads to form weaves that are simultaneously semiotic (because they are relational, and/or they carry meanings) and material (because they are about the physical stuff caught up and shaped in those relations.)” (Law, 2019, p. 1). That is to say, what all the theories encompassed by material-semiotics have in common is that they conceive the material and social as co-constituting each other in dynamic relations (Law, 2019; Law & Singleton, 2014).

This research framework, like post-structuralism, is concerned with the workings of power within physical and social spaces. Material-semiotics, however, extends post-structuralism’s pursuit beyond the realm of discourse, examining social production rather than social construction and focusing on material-discursive practices rather than textuality alone (Barad, 2007; Bauhardt, 2013; Bennett, 2010; Fox, 2017; Puar, 2012). This approach demands that we go beyond an analysis that prioritizes language as a site through which subjects and objects are made and make themselves, attending, instead, to “matters of practices/doings/actions” constituted by both meanings and materialities (Barad, 2003, p. 802). In return, it promises to allow us to examine how a variety of actants are materialized and how their boundaries are stabilized and de-stabilized.

The feminist strand of material-semiotics seems particularly suitable for the analysis of gendered practices such as period tracking with apps. Feminist technoscience conceptualizations, such as those of Donna Haraway, play a central role in contemporary feminism, tying in with feminism’s long-standing interest in bodies, nature and ontology (Haraway, 1988, 2006). These perspectives allow researchers to develop an approach to the many manifestations of power that avoids dualism and considers materiality as a dynamic force (Coleman et al., 2019; Hinton & Tuin, 2014). As Lemke suggests, the transversality of these approaches has long been a central endeavor of feminism, challenging “central dualisms of (post-)modern thought: nature and culture, matter and mind, human

and non-human” (Lemke, 2017, p. 86). Yet, what is new in this material feminism is that it rethinks previous feminist approaches by proposing a “return to matter” that avoids privileging language and meaning to the detriment of the materiality of the body and the agential capacities of nonhuman entities (Lemke, 2017, p. 88).

To study processes of social production, Karen Barad, feminist physicist and scholar of the philosophy of science, introduces the neologism of intra-action. This new concept seeks to illuminate how human and nonhuman entities (including technologies) may co-constitute each other. Barad distinguishes the term from the more familiar inter-action, which presumes the existence of independent entities prior to their encounter, while intra-action refers to the process by which the boundaries between entities participating in action are defined. Thus, intra-action differs from interaction in that the “participants” involved in any relation emerge with and through the human-nonhuman entanglements as they “be/come together” (Lupton, 2019a, p. 2). This notion stems from Barad’s conceptualization of the world as a constant material-discursive differentiation process where boundaries between every-thing – be it a human, a discourse or an object – are the result of a process (Barad, 2007).

Materiality, from this perspective, is the product of an ongoing process of becoming through which different actors are brought together and aligned in particular ways that shape reality (Abrahamsson et al., 2015; Barad, 2003). Matter, it follows, is always dynamic and in relation to something, produced in and through practice (Barad, 2007; Fox & Alldred, 2016; Law, 2010; Mol & Law, 2004). As Barad elucidates, matter refers here to “the materiality/materialization of phenomena, not to an inherent fixed property of independently existing objects” (Barad, 2008, p. 173). Attention to materiality and practices, nonetheless, does not mean disregarding the discursive altogether. Rather, this approach demands an understanding of discursive practices as constraining and enabling what can be said and, consequently, as (re)configuring the world.

Humans’ constitution is understood here as “vital materiality” (Bennett, 2010). The body, from this perspective, is never simply biological nor socially constructed but rather materialized through material-discursive practices that mark their “differential constitution” (Barad, 2003, p. 811; Blackman, 2008; Haraway, 1988). This focus on practices allows scholars to view the human body as open, as a body that extends and connects to others in ways that challenge the cartesian mind-body dualism (Blackman, 2008). Bodies, then, are never singular and their materiality is not fixed. They are open systems that connect to other bodies, artefacts, techniques and practices.

From a material-semiotic perspective, the capacity for agency extends beyond human actors to the nonhuman and inanimate, where no individual entity can be understood as the root cause of an effect (Abrahamsson et al., 2015; Barad, 2007). Here again, Barad’s notion of intra-action is key, as it opens up a new way of thinking agency by demonstrating how agency – the capacity to act– is not possessed

therefore, regarded in terms of the relational capacities distributed across assemblages of diverse bodies, forces, signs and affects. An actant, this relational approach suggests, never really acts alone: its efficacy depends on the collaboration or interference of multiple entities and forces.

Some scholars within the field of STS have cautioned that the use of the term ‘agency’ might carry with it the liberal fantasy of “agency as a property of individual entities” that risks obscuring the emphasis on relationality and co-constitution (Lemke, 2017, p. 95). Material-semiotic studies like the present one must, therefore, retain an attentiveness to how “materialities work in concert”, being mindful not to endorse an isolationist and individualist definition of agency. This is achieved by emphasizing the ways in which matter is engaged in a multiplicity of relations and how it is involved in mediating such relations, where “the analytical privilege is transferred to multiple connections, heterogeneous inter-actions and associations with the non-human” (Lemke, 2017, p. 96). I therefore employ the term “agential capacities”, instead of agency, to shed light on how multiple capacities to act emerge from the intra-actions of humans and nonhumans (Lupton & Smith, 2018).

Material-semiotic perspectives provide us with the conceptual instruments to analyze the world by looking at the “material-semiotic weaves” – usually conceptualized in terms of assemblages – formed by multiple agents and the affective forces that hold them together (Bennett, 2010; Fox & Alldred, 2016; Law, 2019). These assemblages can be understood as transient relational networks comprising both human and nonhuman actants and the relations between them. From this definition, it is already evident that what the concepts of assemblages and the intra-active entanglements discussed above share is “an attention to relationality among ‘parts’, distributed agency, and decentering of the human as agent” (Truman, 2020, p. 4). The term assemblage, as Puar puts it, “is actually an awkward translation of the French term agencement” employed by Deleuze and Guattari (1988; Phillips, 2006; Puar, 2012, p. 57). The concept was meant to emphasize not the content of these webs or constellations, but rather the connections and patterns formed through the coming together of people and things (Puar, 2012). Thus, to productively use the concept, it is important to retain an attention to how relations are built.

This brings us to the concept of affect; assemblages, scholars argue, are held together by the “capacities of assembled relations to affect or be affected”(Fox & Alldred, 2016, p. 18). Affect refers here to the relational force produced within and from the relationship of human and nonhuman agents which work to impel or shut down action and responses (Bucher, 2017; Gregg & Seigworth, 2010). Because these forces are always distributed, they are not reducible to a personal feeling (Hynnä et al., 2019). Instead, they work by achieving some change of state or capabilities in a relation, be it physical, social, political, emotional or otherwise (Fox & Alldred, 2016). They are, therefore, transformative, as they move bodies from one state to another and can either build up or shatter affiliations between various entities.

Previous literature

Self tracking

Self-tracking apps, scholars argue, extend what has been called the “clinical gaze” into non-clinical spaces, changing the spatiality and temporality of health care (Fox, 2017; Lupton, 2016; Ruckenstein & Schüll, 2017). The notion of the clinical gaze can be traced back to Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic, where he argues that the development of the medical profession in the late eighteenth century changed our perception of the human body and disease by making the clinician the privileged reader of the body, understood as a collection of overlapping systems. The term “clinical gaze” is typically used critically to denote the objectifying medical separation of the patient's body from the patient's lived experiences. Through this gaze, the body is understood “as a site of interior knowledge that must be excavated in order to be made functional”(Shaw, 2012, p. 112). The patient’s body is viewed as a mechanism in which problems can be fixed, as long as they are made detectable. To “read” the body’s signs, however, patients and their complaints are silenced because patients, in this paradigm, generate noise that prevents a clear interpretation of bodily indicators (Shaw, 2012). Through the conversion of everyday activities into data flows that can be constantly monitored, digital tools extend this gaze’s range, offering individuals, health care professionals and technology designers access to previously inaccessible domains of people’s lives (Neff & Nafus, 2016; Ruckenstein & Schüll, 2017).

Because they participate in this paradigm, researchers suggest, the use of self-tracking technologies extends the objectification of user’s bodies outside the clinic through an emphasis on physiology over bodily sensations and social capacities (Fox, 2017; Toner, 2018). Self tracking, this strand of research suggests, “outsources” bodily intuition to technical devices, objectifying the embodied subject while doing little to help users understand their bodies (Smith & Vonthethoff, 2017; Toner, 2018). In line with a pathologizing gaze that locates disease in the individual body of the patient, research on personal health technologies finds that the quantification and digitalization enforced by many digital health devices foment a narrow representation of users’ experiences in ways that individualize health states to the detriment of social determinants (Fox, 2017; Lupton, 2013b).

Researchers, moreover, find that these devices privilege the visual in representing the body, just as in Foucault’s clinical gaze “the eye becomes the depositary and source of clarity” (Foucault, 2012, p. xiii; Lupton, 2012b; Lupton & Maslen, 2017; Maslen, 2017; Ruckenstein, 2014). This preeminence of the visual is evidenced by the devices’ report of users’ physiological processes and behavior through visualizations which are often understood as more trustworthy than users’ subjective accounts (Blaxter, 2009; Kelly et al., 2019; Lupton, 2013b; Ruckenstein, 2014, p. 77). The use of these digital health technologies can, therefore, be understood as a logical extension of medicine’s reliance on visualizing technologies that widen the capacities of human sight, such as the x-ray or the microscope (Lupton & Maslen, 2017). Self-trackers, however, allow for detailed representations of the body and its

is, a totally knowable body (van Dijck, 2011). Devices, from this perspective, are expected to act as mediators that broaden our ability to scrutinize and modify our bodies. This emphasis on visibility is thus connected to ideas of self-optimization: “by making unknown aspects of bodies and lives detectable, we can gain more control over life processes and entities”(Ruckenstein, 2014, p. 69). The cultural construct of the “transparent body” is, however, rooted in a paradox: “imaging technologies claim to make the body more transparent, yet their ubiquitous use renders the interior body more technologically complex” (van Dijck, 2011, pp. 3–4). That is to say, the more we rely on media technologies to render the body knowable, the more this mediation complexifies and stratifies our understanding of it.

The focus on how self-trackers extend the “clinical gaze”, however, risks overly emphasizing the fragmenting, and decontextualizing effects of digital technologies, overlooking how people make sense of data in their everyday life (Ruckenstein & Schüll, 2017). It is not enough to recognize that these technologies participate in a structure of perception that externalizes internal processes to control them. Researchers, this literature suggests, must also explore how this occurs in everyday life, fleshing out how data impacts reflexively upon their users (Lupton et al., 2018; Ruckenstein, 2014; Sharon & Zandbergen, 2017). From this perspective, the visibility regime encouraged by personal health technologies is studied by exploring how users confront and interact with their data (Ruckenstein, 2014). While self tracking is often referred to as “quantification of the self”, that is, as a means to grasp insights about one’s body based on objective data, people using self-tracking technologies must learn how to interpret and evaluate their data. Hence, by looking at people’s engagements with data, this literature emphasizes both the active and partial nature of visibility and exposes how visualization can elicit critical reflection by offering new ways of knowing that can be reflected on and used for various purposes (Ruckenstein, 2014).

Moreover, while visuality tends to be privileged, the sensory experiences and judgments involved in the use of self-tracking technologies are not limited to visual data (Lupton & Maslen, 2017; Maslen, 2017; Pink & Fors, 2017). When self tracking, this literature suggests, users engage in data sense-making that is multi-sensory, embodied, and inter-corporeal, that is, intertwined with and distributed across other human and nonhuman bodies (Lupton & Maslen, 2017, 2018). In effect, this scholarship points to the embodied work entailed in the gathering and analyses of health information, which may be transformed but not eliminated by the use of personal health technologies, and which incorporates all senses. The intra-actions of human bodies and (sensing) technologies therefore extend the orders of sensation beyond the human body, contributing to the configuration of a new sensory perception (Lupton, 2020; Lupton & Maslen, 2018).

Scholars interested in expanding the scope of self-tracking literature have advocated for research that looks at apps as transformative mediators (Lupton, 2019a; Pols & Moser, 2009; Ruckenstein & Schüll, 2017). Research, these scholars argue, must employ an approach that looks at

self-tracking apps as actants with the ability to guide, format, and/or alter the course of the tracked phenomenon (Ruckenstein & Schüll, 2017). Apps, as mediators are both socially produced and socially productive as they “structure and shape possibilities for action”(Williamson, 2015). Self-tracking technologies, moreover, give rise to functional, social and affective relations with their users, that cannot be accounted for by the Foucauldian-inspired approaches (Schwennesen, 2017). According to this perspective, research on the social dimension of digital health either focuses too heavily on the self-disciplining elements of tracking or overestimates user’s sociality and self-making ability (Lupton, 2019c; Ruckenstein & Schüll, 2017). This assessment encourages researchers to reflect on the affordances of digital health technologies and to explore the relational connections, affective forces and agential capacities that emerge in digital health monitoring.

Only a handful of studies have approached self-tracking apps from a more-than-human perspective (Lupton, 2019d, 2020; Ruckenstein & Schüll, 2017). A notable exception is sociologist Deborah Lupton’s work, which addresses the use of digital technologies from a feminist new materialist approach, focusing on how humans come together with digital technologies to generate agential capacities (Lupton, 2018, 2019a, 2019b, 2019c, 2019d). Starting from the premise that apps are sociocultural artefacts that work with and through users, Lupton’s latest work finds that human-app assemblages bring together a constellation of “affective forces, personal biographies and life trajectories, human and nonhuman affordances and cultural imaginaries” (Lupton, 2018, 2019c, p. 125). The relations between these elements, Lupton argues, may not only open up but also, potentially, close off agential capacities depending on how different actants intra-act with each other. Agential capacities, she explains, are part of the lived experience of app use: “whether an app is experienced as useful, enjoyable, or easy to use” depends on the connections it establishes with users’ and other (non)human entities (Lupton, 2018, p. 2). If an app does not integrate well with users’ expectations, experiences, and contexts the assemblage’s capacity to act will be closed off. Thus, the emergence (or shutting off) of agential capacities in self tracking depends on the articulations of digital technologies, people and their material-discoursive contexts.

I follow Lupton in studying agential capacities, instead of agency, to emphasize how the capacity to act is always relational and distributed (Lupton, 2018, 2019c). While most of the previous research on tracking apps has taken up a Foucauldian-inspired approach that illuminates the self-disciplinary elements of these technologies, the recent inquiries discussed above have begun to identify self-tracking apps as mediators embedded in assemblages of data, technologies and people. Being mindful of apps’ material influences allows researchers to discuss how they give rise to functional, social and affective relations with their users, either opening or closing off agential capacities (Lupton, 2019c; Schwennesen, 2017). Against this backdrop, this thesis takes as its object the practices involved in a particular kind of self tracking: that of period tracking with apps. Research on period-tracking apps

motivations for period tracking. This body of research has begun to identify the normative ideals and tacit assumption embedded in period-tracking app’s design, as well as the reasons why users choose to employ them. I now turn my attention to these topics before delving into my analysis.

Period-tracking apps

Period-tracking apps are technologies that allow the observation and analysis of menstrual cycles and a wide variety of (seemingly) related factors. Most menstrual apps have four main features or screens (Figure 1) (J. Levy, 2020). First, they focus attention on a numerical countdown indicating the number of days left until the start of the next period. Second, they include a menstrual calendar screen showing past, current and predicted future period dates. Third, menstrual apps usually have menus that offer a variety of tracking categories, including physical and mental parameters as well as behavioral aspects assumed to be related to menstruation, such as cramps and moods. Last, but not least, most apps include graphs, tables and numerical illustrations charting user’s average cycle length, period length and other statistics for the various parameters measured.

Figure 1 Screenshots of the popular period-tracking app Clue, as shown in the Apple Store Preview. Retrieved from

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/clue-period-tracker-fertility/id657189652#?platform=iphone

Following a similar pattern as existing literature on self tracking, most studies on period-tracking apps have looked into the embedded ideologies and risks of their content and features. Previous research has found that most of the apps in the market are inaccurate in their predictions (Duane et al., 2016; Moglia et al., 2016; Setton et al., 2016; Zwingerman et al., 2019). Zwingerman and colleagues, for instance, find that while some high-quality period-tracking apps are available, many more contain serious inexactitudes. This, they argue, “could put users at risk of either inadvertent pregnancy or delayed conception” (Zwingerman et al., 2019, p. 7). Likewise, scholars and mainstream media have warned users about the privacy threats posed by most commercial period-tracking apps, whose business model depends on selling data (Beilinson, 2016; K. Levy, 2014; Lupton, 2015, 2017). Another line of research has looked into period-tracking apps’ interfacial regimes, arguing that their design tends to

legitimate “certain forms of knowledge and experience, while rendering others invisible”(K. Levy, 2014, p. 687). Through interface analysis, this scholarship examines the normative implications of how period-tracking apps’ present and structure possible action for end-users. They conclude that these apps reinforce binary gender roles, portraying female bodies as chaotic and making women responsible for reproduction (Lupton, 2015). As such, period-tracking apps are found to participate in and (re)produce long-established discourses and practices that construe female bodies as “out of control” and thus in need of constant monitoring (Kressbach, 2019; Lupton, 2015; Bendelow &Williams 2002).

Despite their popularity, only limited scholarly attention has been paid to users’ practices and experiences of period tracking (J. Levy, 2020). Existing studies are mostly exploratory in nature, examining users’ motivations and methods of tracking. People, research finds, track their menstrual cycle for varied reasons, including but not limited to remembering and predicting them (Rubinsky et al., 2018; Gambier-Ross et al., 2018; Epstein et al., 2017; J. Levy & Romo-Avilés, 2019). Users report using period-tracking apps to observe their menstrual cycle, monitor menstrual “symptoms”, inform their interactions with healthcare professionals and to track their overall health (J. Levy & Romo-Avilés, 2019). In one of the few papers that further explores the motivations for period-tracking, Amanda Karlsson looks at the connections between menstrual stigma and the usage of period trackers, finding that period trackers serve “not only as digitized management tools to keep track of bleeding days but also as private scopes to engage with the menstruating body: a place to find reassurance and to escape menstrual stigma in everyday life” (Karlsson, 2019, p. 120). These findings, Karlsson suggests, indicate that digital technologies are being used to handle and hide menstruation, which is still taboo in contemporary society.

Whilst existing research has primarily been concerned with the risks of using period-tracking apps or the reasons people give for digitally monitoring their periods, this thesis considers period-tracking practices from a more-than-human perspective that illuminates the complex entanglements between data, bodies and technologies. As discussed above, previous research looking at users’ practices indicates that period-tracking apps participate of people’s lives in a multiplicity of ways, not only as tools for the prediction of the period but also as safe spaces where users can “push back on cultural norms by using it to reclaim the body” (Karlsson, 2019, p. 120). This finding may at first seem to be in stark contradiction to that of interface analyses that find that period-tracking apps contribute to normative discourses and practices that construe female bodies as “out of control” and in need of continuous monitoring (Lupton, 2015). A feminist material-semiotic approach, however, can help understand these paradoxes by illuminating – through an attentiveness to relational connections – the fine line between self-discipline and self-care and exploring what kinds of actions and agencies arise in period tracking with apps. (Ruckenstein & Schüll, 2017; Ussher & Perz, 2013). Building on the theoretical approach presented above, in what follows, I discuss how the practices involved in

app-assisted period tracking generate the capacity to materialize the cycle, to learn to be affected and to feel in control.

Chapter 3 Materializing

Before it was more just focused on, just okay having... my period is coming. That's what's going on. Whereas now it's more like the whole cycle because the period is the only part that you see with your eyes, but the rest of it now I have more of an understanding of like the whole cycle. (Cara)

One of the main agential capacities that emerges through app-assisted period tracking, this chapter argues, is the materialization of the cycle beyond the period. The citation above was Cara’s answer to my question about whether tracking her period has changed how she feels and experiences her cycle. Cara’s answer, singling out her perceptions before and after period-tracking, points to the main argument of this chapter, that is, that app-assisted period tracking (re)configures how participant’s cycles are materialized, making accessible and actionable the “invisible” inner processes of the body. What changes when users start tracking is the “mattering” of cycles, from a focus on the period, as the only external element of the cycle, to an understanding of the cycle as a whole process that happens mostly inside the body, inaccessible to the bare eye. Users’ reflections, this chapter argues, demonstrate that period-tracking materializes the cycle as more than “just a period”, as another participant, Joyce, would put it. As these accounts start to illuminate, period tracking with apps emerges as a means for users to access the internal processes of their bodies, making them capable of being acted on.

This chapter thus expands on literature discussing the relationship between (female) embodiment, apps and quantification, by following how cycles are materialized in situated practices of app-assisted period tracking. Paying particular attention to how the “period in-between periods” is brought into being, the present chapter applies a material-semiotic approach to the study of period tracking, which allows us to move from questions regarding the representation of periods and cycles to questions of (re)constitution. The analysis is organized around a key question: how are cycles brought into being through the practices and affordances involved in period tracking with apps? The chapter’s analysis starts by discussing the before-and-after narratives of users reflecting on how period tracking has changed how they experiment with and experience their cycles and their bodies. The pleasure and purpose of period tracking with apps, this analysis finds, is that it brings the body’s interior processes into being in a “systematic” way, (re)configuring the cycle as either a series of phases or an interval with a certain (normative) duration. In all cases, period tracking with apps becomes a means for users to access their internal body, to materialize the invisible processes of the cycle in ways that can be acted upon. Measuring and metrics, in this context, are employed in a quest to make the body accessible and transparent.

How Things Come to Matter

Reality, STS and new materialist scholars contend, is constantly being enacted – produced, materialized, (re)configured – through practices (Law, 2010; Moser, 2008). The materiality and materialization of reality is, therefore, a process, a becoming, that results from the intra-action of material as well as discursive factors (Barad, 2007). Bodies, objects and facts, this literature insists, are not reducible to discourse, culture or social construction, but rather are materialized and brought into being in practices and relations. Since every-thing is the relational effect of practices, to understand the “mattering” of the material researchers must look at situated practices to see how various constellations of actants emerge and act in specific situations(Barad, 1998; Law, 2010). Materialization is, in this sense, always relational, in that “something becomes material because it makes a difference: because somehow or other it is detectable” (Law, 2010). That is, as long as a relation in an assemblage can affect or be affected, it is understood as material (Fox & Alldred, 2016). “Things” matter because they affect and mediate practices.

When attending to the practices involved in the materialization of cycles through app-assisted tracking, measuring appears as a key practice through which cycles are produced. Period-tracking apps can be understood as an apparatus, a technology used to measure a property. Following Barad’s approach, however, neither the measurements, the properties nor the instruments used to calculate them can be fixed prior to the intra-action (Barad, 1998). Rather, the boundaries of the “measured object” and the “measuring instrument” are enacted through the measuring practice itself; they co-constitute each other. Apparatuses, Barad explains, draw the boundaries through which entities are constituted and properties come to matter (1998; 2003). Thus, the referent for the measured property is never an independent bounded object but the entanglement of intra-acting agencies (Tuin, 2012). The very act of measuring materializes the thing being measured in a particular way.

If different apparatuses and practices configure different objects, it is because the diverse materialities involved bring together actors and elements in particular ways (Bennett, 2010). This can be better understood as referring to the concept of affordances conceived in relational terms. Affordances, from this perspective, are not a property of the apps themselves (their features) but rather something that emerges within assemblages of human and nonhuman entities. The study of affordances as a relational property brings to the fore that materialities always work in concert and that any ‘doing’ “is a distributed achievement” (Abrahamsson et al., 2015, p. 13). The affordances of technological objects – and the fleshy affordances of human bodies, for that matter – are not reducible to a static material constitution. They are contingent and situated, made present under specific circumstances and through particular modes of engagement (Bloomfield et al., 2010). This approach thus requires that we identify the relational connections between the various actors involved in the assemblage and trace the forces that shape which capacities are opened or closed off in an assemblage and how (Lupton, 2019d).

Additionally, a feminist approach to affordances points out that the enabling and constraining forces that emerge in assemblages are never neutral: they have built-in assumptions and values about the world on which they are acting (Bucher & Helmond, 2017). “They contribute to some worlds-in-progress but not to others”, that is, they participate in the process of making the world intelligible in a specific way (Moser, 2008). Technologies, in particular, may be analyzed as containing a “script” for those who use them, offering suggestions about who the ideal user is, what their needs are and in what ways they should interact with the technology (Light et al., 2016; Pols & Moser, 2009). Technologies can therefore be understood as “enacting and making manifest particular normativities, and so also shaping the world the actors live in” (Mol et al., 2015, p. 162). These scripts, however, and the action-possibilities they materialize, do not determine the actual situated practices. Instead, technologies act and are acted upon within specific contexts, interacting (or intra-acting) with human and nonhuman elements which have a role in shaping the encounter.

Not Just a Period

The simplest way to track a cycle using a period-tracking app is to log in the dates when the period occurs. Florencia, for instance, a Clue user, describes her use of the app in the following way: “I realize I am having my period, and I say, ‘ah, since I have the phone with me’ I open Clue and I fill it in. It takes two seconds, I just do tic, tic, tic”. While the more indicators users track the more complex information they receive, users who only tap on their app to input the date when they are bleeding still get information about their personal average cycle length and predictions about when their future period might take place. Hence, even with minimal engagement, the apps act not as record-keeping intermediaries but as nonhuman mediators that take a simple piece of information – users’ period date – and transform its meaning by producing visualizations, averages and associations. The output, and the practices that they enable, in turn (re)configure the cycle in a certain way, as something that has an expected length and which repeats itself over time.

Indeed, just like Cara in the fragment that starts this chapter, most interviewees felt that using a period-tracking app had changed the way they experienced their cycles, making visible “the periods that are in between” periods, as Elena calls them. Talking about the app in the context of the interview, Hannah explained, made her realize “the impact that it had without even me noticing that it was happening”. She does not know when “the switch happened” but “before all the different information that I've gotten from the app, I looked at my period like something that just happened”. The apps’ interfaces were prized by users for giving them an “overview” (Elena) and allowing them to “see at one glance” where in the cycle they were (Blake). Instead of the period “coming out of nowhere” (Agne) or being “something that happens” (Hannah), app-assisted period tracking makes users aware of their cycle and helps them be more “in touch with kind of what's happening” (Agne).

Period tracking with apps was portrayed by users as making cycles more “systematic” or “organized” (Florencia) and the practices involved in doing it were described by Jori as giving “a bit of consistency to my life”. Monitoring makes the hidden processes of the cycle, if not comprehensible, at least perceptible to users; if you do not track your period, Florencia explains, “it is easier to see it as something more random”. Similar to a calendar, she explains, apps give users a “material record”, but their visualizations make the systematicity of cycles even more evident: “in the app you even see it more clearly because you see the whole little circle, and that little circle repeats itself every month" (Florencia). Cycles as a whole thus materialize as a process that has – at least– a beginning and an ending and that is repeated every month or so.

Apps do not just re-present cycles to users but participate in re-configuring them. Users described how using an app to monitor their cycle has changed how they feel about their bodies: “the app has helped me understand, more medically why certain things are happening, during certain times, and like how can I address them in ways that are more positive” (Hannah). Inner workings hidden to the untrained eye can therefore be unearthed through tracking and acted upon in positive ways, as we shall see in future chapters. Period-tracking apps thus widen human sight’s capabilities – what Cara calls “seeing with your eyes”– just like (medical) technologies have done in the past. In doing so, an ideal of a transparent body is advanced where the human body is conceived as completely knowable if the right tools are employed (van Dijck, 2011).

The pleasure and purpose of using a period-tracking app, then, has to do with the fact that it brings the cycle into being in some "systematic” way. It materializes the invisible and seemingly immaterial processes of the body to one's self through practices that require users to measure, making sense of, and making sense with, digital data. Blake, for example, describes how using a period tracker “helps me make sense of things that are happening, and it also shows me... It has shown me that a lot of things that are happening to my body have a reason for happening”. Measuring has materialized aspects of Blake’s embodiment which used to be inaccessible, such as “hormone levels”, and allows Blake to see patterns in the inner workings of their body, even when their period happens to be irregular. The apps’ affordances and scripts thus intra-act and align with users and their bodies in ways that shape the reality of cycles for users themselves.

Through period tracking with apps, user accounts demonstrate, cycles are systematized in two main ways: as either a sequence of phases or as an interval. The ways in which cycles are materialized are informed by the relational connections between users and the app’s affordances and scripts. As we shall see in the next section, when cycles are materialized as a sequence of phases, the body emerges as “working” in consonance with multiple actants to reach the following phase and each phase is correlated with specific sociability and performance levels. When they are instead (re)configured as intervals, apps serve to visualize the duration of the gap between cycles. Once the interval is quantified, it can be compared with target values which are also produced within the human-app assemblage. In both cases,

however, what users gain from period-tracking is the materialization of their cycle in a more “systematic” way that allows them to take action.

Sequence of phases

When going through her app with me, Cara excitedly says: “Oh, I forgot to show you… This is one of the best bits!”. The phone displays a graph (Figure 2) and Cara continues: “so this is what I use when I'm trying to persuade people to get the app”. The graph, Cara tells me, charts a full month of temperatures users have input on her app, Natural Cycles, and shows how every cycle “follows the same pattern every time”, going up or down depending on which phase of your cycle you are in. Using this chart, Cara says, “I know exactly when I had my period and what my body is trying to do on its way to the next part”.

Figure 2 Natural Cycles’ basal temperature graph. Retrieved from https://www.naturalcycles.com/hcp/what-is-natural-cycles/

This vignette signals the way in which the interfacial regimes of some period-tracking apps, in consonance with user practices, work together to materialize cycles as following a knowable pattern, construing cycles as a continuous sequence of phases. Blake, a Clue user, for example, explains that by tracking they have been able to see how “particular symptoms are more frequent in a particular phase”. These phases include not only menstruation and ovulation but also the follicular phase – where, according to the Natural Cycles “My Cycle” tab, “your temperature is low and your body experiences an increase in both estrogen and the follicle-stimulating hormone”– and the luteal phase – where “oestrogen and progesterone start to rise and remain high,” according to the app FitrWoman. In these descriptions, and throughout my conversation with users such as Cara, Blake and Hannah, different actors and elements are brought together to be in play: follicles, temperatures, ovulation, and hormones are all (invisible) actors in a complex assemblage. They rise and fall, they affect each other, “working” as Cara puts it, towards the next cycle phase. These user descriptions and practices (re)configure their

so. Tracking, users contend, gives them a “better appreciation for their body” because they understand why certain things happen “and what your body is like going through and the capabilities that it's enabling you” (Hannah).

While before tracking they thought of their cycle only in terms of their period, some users now experience their cycle as subdivided into different phases, with a particular “physiology” or hormonal level, which affects how they feel and which can be channeled in positive and productive ways. Indeed, apps like Natural Cycles and FitrWoman, and to a lesser extent Clue, correlate each of the cycle phases with different sociability and performance levels and recommend particular behaviors, which my participants tried to apply, to either exploit or counteract these patterns. Cara, for example, explains that at the NGO where she works, she and her co-workers are using these apps to see how the different phases of the cycle may affect their performance to “work most productively”. Hence, cycles are materialized as a sequence of phases not only through the app’s discourse and interfacial regimes but also through the material practices and relations that they encourage and demand. In Baradian terms, the identification of phases can therefore be seen as shaping the material-discursive field of possibilities that may, in turn, make a difference in the enactment of relations in practice. Hannah’s understanding and use of the information her app gives her illustrates this point. The app, she explains, provides her with information about “where your hormone levels are” which must then be put to work by engaging in practices that “best keep that balance, like the type of diet you should be following, and the type of exercise you should be focusing on”, which she tries to follow, as we will see in chapter 5.

Not all users, however, choose to engage in these self-optimizing practices, even when made aware of the possibility. Eva, for instance, said that her friends had recommended to her a book about “using your cycle for the better and when to plan this and when to plan that… and I was like, fuck, I don't want to be dictated by this”. Even when presented with the possibility of self-optimizing, then, users may be skeptical of engaging in such practices. Apps appear here as one of many “entangled material agencies” (Barad, 2007, p. 56), including user’s friends, books and their own understandings of what it means to “use your cycle for the better”, which in the case of Eva is equated to being “dictated” by her hormonal (im)balances. Interestingly, what deters Eva from engaging in self-optimization is not that she does not believe that hormonal changes throughout the cycle may affect her sociability or her performance, but rather that she does not want to be a “victim of my cycle”, as she puts it. It is not a question of whether “it scientifically true”, she said, but rather that it “doesn't bring me any positivity” and makes her feel like she is letting her hormones take control over her life.

Intervals

Not all human-app assemblages support the materialization of cycles as divided into phases. Instead, many of the participants’ accounts configure that time as an “interval” defined by how many days there are between one period and the next. The material practices and relations that enact cycles in such a way are different from those involved in the materialization of cycles as sequences of phases. Here, the

most important task is to annotate period dates. The home-screen of My Calendar, the app that Joyce and Lisa use, for instance, shows a cartoon cat that users can tap to indicate whether their period has started or ended: “for me it’s so easy to like, I just have to tap the cat” (Lisa)(Figure 3). Users can of course input more data, but for this style of mattering minimal information is enough. In terms of output, the app’s charting features become less important, giving priority to the calendar functions of the interfaces, which mark the dates of previous periods.

Figure 3 My Calendar home-screen. Retrieved from Google Images

As argued above, while input here is minimal, the app still behaves as a transformative mediator, transforming users’ “taps” into complex data, particularly averages and calendar visualizations, which are then used by participants as indicators of the inner workings of their bodies. As Surya, who uses the app Period Tracker, puts it, her app’s interface is simple, but has “a big calendar” she consults to know how long it has been since her last period: “you are like, okay it makes sense, it is far apart enough". This comment points to the way in which the measuring of periods, to be of any significance, has to be accompanied by standards or target levels that give meaning to the data collected by the user. This target, in most cases, was defined as having intervals of roughly the same length as either a personal average or the average value suggested by the app. As Joyce puts it: “I just want to see the intervals and if it is not on my average interval, I get to check myself”. This interpretation of how to read the duration of the gaps between periods is echoed by several participants who use different apps. Elena, Lisa, Eva, Surya and Vanessa all suggested that, in one way or another, the information

Elena puts it. That is, cycle duration (and its constancy) was understood by participants as a sign of the inner workings of the body: one is fine if the interval in between periods is around one month, every month. Otherwise, something inside is wrong. While this may seem like a less sophisticated way of making accessible the hidden aspects of the cycle, it still brings the interior of the body into the world of actionable practices, if anything by encouraging users to seek medical attention if the period is not average.

Importantly, the human-app assemblage not only performs cycles in a certain way but also

produces the standards against which participants measure themselves. In other words, the practices

involved in period tracking with apps both produce the cycles as intervals and establish a threshold of what are good and bad interval values. This does not mean that apps in and of themselves push users to measure themselves against an average they provide. Thinking about the apps in terms of an apparatus exposes how they are neither neutral tools nor structures that determine a particular outcome (Barad, 2003). Period-tracking apps, as mentioned in the introduction, insert themselves in pre-existing assemblages that construe all stages of women’s reproductive lives as “potentially pathological” and thus in need of control, giving rise to women’s long-established self-monitoring routines (Bendelow & Williams, 2002; Lupton, 2012a, 2015). In effect, the technical affordances of period-tracking apps participate in configuring target levels, but so do users’ biographies, previous experiences and socio-cultural backgrounds. In some cases, for instance, target values are defined by information acquired outside the app, like in the case of Elena, who had previously read that the length of a regular cycle was “between 28 and 35” days. Joyce, in contrast, is happy to have a regular cycle, which for her means “27 or 25 days only” because that is the average duration of her own cycle as calculated by the app. Thus, attention to intra-activity illuminates how the different target levels do not precede the assemblage but are instead materialized via the practices involved in period tracking.

When cycles are materialized as intervals, the apps’ use of data and visualizations construe irregular cycles – that is, intervals which continually fall outside average ranges – as deviant. Falling into the ‘right’ values, however they are defined, is therefore seen by users as an achievement and source of joy, while being unable to achieve the target values produces worry. Using an app to track her cycle, for instance, makes Joyce feel more positive about her period “since I am still on track, I still meet the average, it means that ‘Oh, you're doing great’”. The flip side of this is that because tracking periods makes irregularities detectable and readable as a sign that something is wrong with the inner workings of the body, using the app can elicit negative emotions. Elena was particularly upset not to

be “regular”, constantly referring to her cycle as abnormal even after consulting with a doctor who had

assured her she was healthy. When I asked her whether she still felt like something was wrong, she bawled, “Yes! Because everyone has it at 28 days! Except me!”.

Having an irregular period not only affects users emotionally; it also interferes with the apps’ predictions and notifications in ways that make them inoperable. Vanessa, for instance, who uses Flo,