Menstruation and Technopolitics of Resistance - feminist activisms and the plataformization of the menstrual cycle

• Grant number: 22/14937-3
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Start date: September 01, 2023
• End date: August 31, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Larissa Maués Pelúcio Silva
• Grantee: Larissa Maués Pelúcio Silva
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Arquitetura, Artes, Comunicação e Design (FAAC). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Bauru. Bauru , SP, Brazil

Abstract

In this project I intend to discuss menstruation as a technopolitical issue, considering the formation of menstrual activism groups in South American countries and the growing extractivism of biological and physiological data that occurs through mobile applications for monitoring the menstrual cycle. The investigative field unfolds in a platform ethnography and multi-territorialized with digital fronts and other face-to-face in the territory. In the online environment, the investigative attention falls on Flo Period & Ovulation Tracker, an application for menstrual control, one of the most popular menstruapps on the market, in addition to participatory observation in profiles on the Instagram platform of two South American projects dedicated to menstrual education and activism (Escuela de Educación Menstrual Emanciapadas - Medellín, Colombia and Educación Menstrual Lunática - Buenos Aires, Argentina), as well as the Coletivo Feminista Sexualidade e Saúde (São Paulo, Brazil). The first two are spaces of knowledge production, in which menstrual education and thought in its political, decolonial and emancipatory dimension. The third is and Brazilian NGO dedicated to autonomous gynecology, where courses, lectures and workshops are also offered. In all these organizations, I will be doing participant observation and I will effectively carry out the trainings offered by the mentioned projects. I am interested in understanding how this activism relates to feminist agendas from the global south; how they think, use, challenge (or not) medical and technological knowledge, such as those offered by menstruapps. I also intend to immerse myself in Flo's architecture in order to understand what gender, sexuality and health values they operate with and how they circulate among people who use the app. The treatment of the materials uses tools such as NVivo software in order to organize and categorize content produced both by Flo and by the materials of the organizations that will be visited. I add to this tool the offline and platformized ethnographic research. The data will be analyzed and discussed from the contributions of feminist studies, gender studies, and platform studies, informed by decolonial discussions on data extraction and the datification of life, inspired by Actor-Network Theory (AU)