Fertility Awareness Practices among Young Women

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to characterize fertility awareness and describe its relationship with gender apparatus and biomedicalization. Using an ethnographic approach, we began with a Facebook group and conducted semi-structured interviews with six of its spokespersons. In addition, we analyzed books and sites recommended in these interviews and made participant observation in a faceto-face course given by one of the interlocutors. We conclude that concomitant to collective projects for empowering bodies and subjectivities with menstrual cycles, individual responsibility is established for health and self-improvement. Furthermore, the substantialization of sexual binarism is reinforced with the production of a “hormonal nature”, although it is linked more to health than to gender.