Hacking the Cycle: Femtech, Internalized Surveillance, and Productivity

Femtech refers to a growing range of technologies that aim to address health needs typically associated with women’s bodies, such as maternal health, fertility, menstruation, sexual wellness, or contraception. We examine a specific popular femtech product, cycle tracking apps, as an instrument of self-surveillance for greater productivity. Our analysis is grounded in the phenomenology of temporality—we understand workplace surveillance technologies as advancing an internalized sense of time discipline, generating a personal experience of time as a constant call to improve one’s workplace productivity. We then examine how the same dynamic reveals itself in the vocabulary and functionality of popular cycle-tracking apps. Our paper contributes to the existing feminist critiques of femtech, namely, the examination of cycle-tracking apps as promoting a false sense of empowerment and separating users from self-knowledge of their bodies. We argue that cycle-tracking apps perpetuate the attitude that menstruators need to manage their cycle for the sake of reliable participation in productivity demands, creating a disconnect between their internal experience of the temporality of menstruation and external pressures. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2024.