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Walking Through Normativities of Reproductive Bodies: A Method for Critical Analysis of Tracking Applications

Published: 19 April 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Menstruation and fertility tracking applications are of increasing concern in HCI research, as their use becomes more widespread. Methods are needed to understand how such applications become entangled in everyday practices. While these apps promise increased self-knowledge of reproductive potential by collecting intimate data about reproductive bodies, they also restrict the knowledge produced about users’ bodies and embed normative understandings of reproduction and gender. In this paper, we scrutinize the normativities of reproductive bodies by deploying the “walkthrough method” to uncover sociotechnical entanglements of the menstruation and fertility apps Clue, Tilly, and Drip. We discuss how the walkthrough method contributes to HCI's methodological repertoire for studying intimate bodily tracking apps and unpacking their normativities. We offer suggestions for using this method to critically analyze existing apps and extend approaches to design with and for a plurality of in/fertile bodies.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '23: Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2023
    14911 pages
    ISBN:9781450394215
    DOI:10.1145/3544548
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    Published: 19 April 2023

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    1. fertility
    2. methods
    3. reproductive health
    4. self-tracking

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    • (2024)Designing with Discomfort: A Feminist Approach towards Intimate Care TechnologiesCompanion Publication of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3656156.3665134(30-36)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
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