Data-Body Mirror: Digital Menstrual Cycle Tracking and the Reconstruction of Young Women's Bodily Cognition

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-577-5_90How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Self-tracking; Menstrual Tracking Apps; Female Body; Situated Knowledge; Feminist Technoscience

Abstract

Self-tracking practices, particularly the use of menstrual cycle tracking applications, have gained increasing popularity among young women in China nowadays. Predominant research has adopted a critical paradigm, focusing on issues such as surveillance capitalism, commercial logic, and neoliberal discipline underlying these technologies. This focus, however, risks obscuring the active experiences and agency of the users themselves. Consequently, this paper aims to facilitate a constructive shift in perspective. Integrating insights from the embodied phenomenology, feminist technoscience, and Foucault's theory of “technologies of the self,” this article constructs an analytical framework centered on subjective experience to explore how digital menstrual tracking apps mediate and reconstruct young women's perception, understanding, and narration of their bodily experiences. The study argues that by datafying the invisible rhythms of the body, menstrual tracking apps serve as a cognitive framework that assists users in transitioning from passively enduring vague bodily sensations to actively interpreting bodily patterns. Rather than being trapped in a binary opposition between data and embodied experience, female users critically integrate both and engage in community interactions, thereby generating highly personalized “situated knowledge.” This process transforms technological affordances into internal capabilities. The daily practice of tracking one's bodily cycles thus transcends the mere individualization of health responsibility; it can be reframed as a “technology of the self” in the digital age. Its purpose shifts from conforming to external healthist standards towards an active practice of self-care dedicated to personal physical-mental harmony. Ultimately, the study advocates for a future development of women’s health technology that moves beyond functionalism and dataism towards a care-ethics-led design paradigm. This calls for more inclusive, transparent, and user-sovereign technologies, alongside fostering critical digital literacy among contemporary youth.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Airong Liu
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/05/15
TI  - Data-Body Mirror: Digital Menstrual Cycle Tracking and the Reconstruction of Young Women's Bodily Cognition
BT  - Proceedings of the 2026 5th International Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities and Arts (SSHA 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 892
EP  - 904
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-577-5_90
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-577-5_90
ID  - Liu2026
ER  -