Bloating, Heavy Legs, and Fatigue: Sport, Menstrual Tracking Apps and More-Than-Hormonal Bodies

Abstract

A wide array of menstrual tracking apps, including a small number of sport-specific menstrual tracking apps, are increasingly being used by athletes and coaches to better understand the complex relationships between hormonal cycles and sporting performance. To date, however, there have been few qualitative inquiries into the affects, affordances, and knowledge produced by entanglements of these apps and their users. In this article, we present a collaborative feminist experiment in ethnography, in which the authors, from a range of academic, sporting, and cultural positionalities, document, discuss, and creatively write our experiences of the sporting-menstrual tracking app FitrWoman, using both theoretically informed and poetic ways of knowing. We find that hormones emerged as the primary conduit of connection, transmission, sensing, and knowing in app-user intra-actions, which we variously experienced as alignments, misalignments, and discordances, as our understandings and experiences of menstruating, hormonal bodies collided, merged, and conflicted.