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12 - Why Do Some People Want to Manage Human Fertility?

from Part II - Our Lives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 October 2022

By
Michelle A. Rensel  and
Rachel A. Vaughn
Edited by
Daniel Scott Souleles ,
Johan Gersel  and
Morten Sørensen Thaning
Daniel Scott Souleles
Affiliation:
Copenhagen Business School
Johan Gersel
Affiliation:
Copenhagen Business School
Morten Sørensen Thaning
Affiliation:
Copenhagen Business School
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Summary

When life throws you a problem, the solution our contemporary market moment proffers tends to be some sort of phone-based computer program, that is, an app. In this chapter, the authors take a look at apps designed to manage menstrual cycles. In so doing, the authors show that apps tend to individualize a problem, prize forms of efficiency and normative ideas of gender, all with a mystifying veneer of utopian market optimization and self-help. What’s interesting for us is the way that apps can individualize the problems they’re trying to solve and in so doing often seek to assist people in enhancing their human capital. The authors close with a contrast to anticapitalist punks seeking not individual optimization but collective liberation. In turn these punks offer those who menstruate a liberatory relationship with their own bodies.

Keywords

capitalismalternativesproblem-solvingfertilityappsGynepunksmensturationanticapitalismoptimization
Type
Chapter
Information
People before Markets
An Alternative Casebook
 , pp. 223 - 248
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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