ABSTRACT
How users engage with mobile applications to self-track and self-measure their sexual and reproductive habits has received much academic and popular attention. From a user and design perspective, these technologies positively impact emotional support and access to medical care information, in addition to promoting empowerment and bodily self-control. Critical views, on the other hand, tend to see these applications as new forms of data monitoring and mining that render all sorts of personal tastes, behaviours and sensitive information visible and available for commercial and profitable analysis. This chapter builds on critical research on digital technologies to discuss how self-tracking and self-quantification mobile applications are also reshaping everyday individual practices. Applying a feminist new materialist perspective, we show how such apps can naturalise powerful disciplinary tools with uncertain consequences for gender relations. Moreover, as we argue, they normalise specific constructions of gender and sexual identities from which users (re)negotiate their sense of self and others in society.
