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Accepted Paper:
The female body reimagined: digital period-tracking, reproductive health, and sexuality
Xiaolin Li
(UCL)
This essay examines the role of period-tracking apps in the making and remaking of the culture of menstruation, reproductive health, and sexuality in China, drawing on an ethnographic study of how users of period-tracking apps collect, interpret, and utilize their bodily data.
Paper long abstract:
This essay examines the role of period-tracking apps in the making and remaking of the culture of menstruation, reproductive health, and sexuality in China, drawing on an ethnographic study of how users of period-tracking apps collect, interpret, and utilize their bodily data. Situated within a wider social-cultural context of the understanding of the menstrual, reproductive and sexual body in the Chinese culture, it explores the way in which the use of period-tracking apps simultaneously blend with the local culture and preexistent practices of the body while offering new opportunities for the reimagination of the female body and bodily practices with its digitalized and datafied new affordances. In focusing on the main motivations and purposes for using period-tracking apps, including, recording menstrual cycle, contraception, and preparing for pregnancy, I show how the functions of period-tracking apps, including tracking the date of menstruation and sexual behaviours, predicting future menstruation and ovulation, and online forum for discussing reproductive health, are used, and how the body is both controlled and liberated, burdened and lightened and eventually, reimagined.