‘Good Day for an Ovulation Test’: An Autoethnographic Exploration of the Intimate Frustrations of Postdigital Cycle-Tracking
摘要
In this paper, I explore cycle-tracking from a first-person perspective, conducting a four-month autoethnography in which I track my cycle using the apps Clue, Flo, and Natural Cycles. In doing so, I approach cycle-tracking as a Postdigital intimacy—a becoming with technology. I ask how cycle-tracking intimately shapes lived experiences and knowledge of the cycle, and contribute with an empirical understanding of what it means to intimately know and experience the cycle with these apps. Through a Crip Technoscience ,y,5 and Crip Human–Computer Interaction perspective, I explore the intimate frustrations that emerge between me and the apps, and how the apps and I work—and fail—together. By combining this with Karen Barad's concept of intra-action, I show how app use becomes larger than the sum of its parts—the user and the technology—through the emergence of intra-actional agencies in between the app and the user. My analysis shows how app cycle-tracking intimately shapes not only the knowledge and lived experience of the cycle, but also the experience of Postdigital life itself. Cycle-knowledge becomes an explanatory framework readily applicable to all kinds of lived experiences, and intra-action with the apps becomes an intimate agency that can be blamed on neither the apps nor the user. Postdigital feminisms, I argue, need to take the intimate intra-actional agencies that appear between technologies and users seriously, and approach and design technologies not with perfection as the default setting, but with failure.