Full text
| |
| Author(s): |
Nicole Cristine Baumgarten
Total Authors: 1
|
| Document type: | Master's Dissertation |
| Press: | São Paulo. |
| Institution: | Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD) |
| Defense date: | 2024-04-24 |
| Examining board members: |
Heloisa Buarque de Almeida;
Daniela Tonelli Manica;
Daniela Osvald Ramos
|
| Advisor: | Heloisa Buarque de Almeida |
| Abstract | |
Period tracking apps, or menstruapps, have been described in the literature both from the perspective of surveillance and control, as well as from the perspective of consumption. This study seeks to analyze the uses and social effects of a specific app, Clue, considering above all the intersection between gender and digital technologies, but also considering other social markers of difference such as race, class, generation, and education. Staring from an ethnographic approach, this work aims to analyze how codes of gender, body, and subjectivity are produced and circulate using this technology. The ethnographic data was collected digitally and through two main inputs. The first one is the app itself, paying attention to its interface, functionalities, the types of information collectedto understand both classic conceptualizations of the human sciences, such as governance and biopolitics, and also more recent ones, such as the datafication of bodies, relationships and the human experience more broadly, and data capitalism. I also consider the app\'s public texts, available both on the brand\'s social media and on the website itself. These texts corroborate a production of public discourses on menstruation. The second field approach was through twenty interviews with users of the app, which took place in 2021, via video calls or text message conversations. The contact and selection of the interviewees occurred via a form developed by myself, which was posted on selected social media to find people who were available for interviews. As the form contained socio-economic and internet access questions, it also served as a guide for understanding the profile being studied. Since all the field entries were carried out digitally, the research is in line with the bibliographical perspective of an embodied, incorporated and everyday internet. I also understand the internet as something constituted and constituting the lives of the subjects studied, understanding the existence of mutual affect between the internet and society and denying the opposition between real and virtual. Based on this material, the dissertation discusses the contemporary menstrual market, data policies, digital subjectivities and gender technopolitics, considering that political identities and complex power relations are at stake, marked by profound inequality between subjects and corporations (AU) | |
| FAPESP's process: | 20/03865-6 - Datafication of period: struggles around self-knowledge and consent in the internet |
| Grantee: | Nicole Cristine Baumgarten |
| Support Opportunities: | Scholarships in Brazil - Master |