“It makes you feel a little bit more heard”: Tracking apps as tools of resistance in medical encounters?

Abstract

Menstruators experience testimonial injustice in medical encounters when their reports of painful and distressing menstrual embodiments are minimised, rebuffed and invalidated. Though not all or only women menstruate, such dismissals reflect long-standing misogynistic conceptualisations of menstruators as irrational, hysterical, or hypochondriacal. In this paper, I relay the accounts of study participants in Aotearoa who reported frustrating experiences of minimisation or dismissal in medical encounters. I explore how participants resisted experiences of testimonial injustice, including through the use of menstrual tracking apps. I argue that participants reassert their epistemic authority as knowers of their own bodies through such acts of resistance. I interrogate the limitations of apps as tools of resistance, highlighting apps’ commercial imperatives, and showing how they reproduce the same forms of epistemic injustice that menstruators use them to resist. Ultimately, I argue that apps will not fundamentally change a health system that too often fails to take menstruators’ concerns seriously.