Know yourself (through data): Menstruation, Data Flows, and Immaterial Labour

Period tracking applications are at the centre of data accumulation practices and at the heart of data-driven medical scientific knowledge production. I want to research the relationships between technology producers and users by using a
framing of data production as labour to analyse how period tracking applications situate themselves as sites of
knowledge over women's bodies and reproduction through discourses of data-driven objectivity. I study how women in
Germany and Egypt use these applications and how this changes how they understand themselves and their bodies. I
preliminarily identified two applications produced in the Global North: Clue and Glow. I employ a mix of methods: an
ethnographic approach and the walkthrough method, to study how young women under 35 in Cairo and Berlin use these
two period tracking applications. My research fills an important gap in the literature on self-tracking which is focused on
the Global North and English-speaking countries and brings women's voices to the global conversation about data
markets and the current moment of data-driven knowledge production. I ask do women using the applications navigate
this space of commodified data in which the time and effort spent inputting data is rendered invisible and the value of this
labour merely trickles down to them? Do period trackers, advertised as neutral, objective, data-driven sources of
knowledge over women's bodies, help women to gain control or knowledge over their bodies?