Zuckerberg, get out of my uterus! An examination of fertility apps, data-sharing and remaking the female body as a digitalized reproductive subject

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the rise of fertility apps and what data-sharing in this arena can mean for app users. The paper offers a brief background of some available fertility apps, how they work and where they are situated in the sphere of health-tracking apps. Exploring how exactly these apps market themselves in terms of feminist-empowerment discourses, the author examines how these claims fit within broader critical discussions around fertility data, data sharing and the ways that applications and algorithms are designed to configure particular versions of reproductive femininity. The author shows the way that intimate data takes on a new life as it is sold on in order to identify women as potential targets for purposes of commercial marketing, as well as the more subtle ways this works to remind female users of reproductive expectations within societies. The paper illustrates the way that fertility apps can play a role in the further medicalization and regulation of the female body as a newly-digitalized reproductive machine, as these apps become a new mode of inducing conception under a veiled guise of appearing to be a harmless and empowering way for women to re-learn and re-claim their bodies.

KEYWORDS:

• Fertility tracking application
• health technologies
• self-surveillance
• fertility marketing
• gender
• assisted reproductive technologies

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Professor Aditya Bharadwaj and Dalia Zein for their helpful comments and conversations during the preparation of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.