Walking Through Normativities of Reproductive Bodies: A Method for Critical Analysis of Tracking Applications

Menstruation and fertility tracking applications are of increasing concern in HCI research, as their use becomes more widespread. Methods are needed to understand how such applications become entangled in everyday practices. While these apps promise increased self-knowledge of reproductive potential by collecting intimate data about reproductive bodies, they also restrict the knowledge produced about users’ bodies and embed normative understandings of reproduction and gender. In this paper, we scrutinize the normativities of reproductive bodies by deploying the “walkthrough method” to uncover sociotechnical entanglements of the menstruation and fertility apps Clue, Tilly, and Drip. We discuss how the walkthrough method contributes to HCI’s methodological repertoire for studying intimate bodily tracking apps and unpacking their normativities. We offer suggestions for using this method to critically analyze existing apps and extend approaches to design with and for a plurality of in/fertile bodies.