what is the project all about?

Millions of people worldwide use digital applications (apps) to monitor their menstrual cycles. These apps can be experienced as empowering, but they are not neutral. They play a role in how users understand their bodies, and by extension, their selves, relationships, and place in the world.

Importantly, menstrual tracking apps are designed around a prototypical user: a white, affluent, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, young woman, which reinforces narrow, potentially harmful, ideas about “normal” or ideal bodies. It is therefore important to ask: What are the experiences of the many non-prototypical users, whose bodies, identities, or life stages are marginalised by these apps?