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12 - Why Do Some People Want to Manage Human Fertility?
from Part II - Our Lives
- By Michelle A. Rensel, Rachel A. Vaughn
Edited by Daniel Scott Souleles, Copenhagen Business School, Johan Gersel, Copenhagen Business School, Morten Sørensen Thaning, Copenhagen Business School
Book:

People before Markets

Published online:

27 October 2022

Print publication:

03 November 2022, pp 223-248
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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.