Gender a výzkum / Gender and Research 2025, 26 (1): 12-34 | DOI: 10.13060/gav.2025.005

‘This Feeling of Multidimensional Disease’: How Women with PCOS Narrate Their Experience with Self-Tracking Apps and Social \r\nMedia

Júlia Karpova ORCID...

University of Southern Denmark

Polycystic ovary syndrome, or PCOS, is a common condition that combines such symptoms as absent or irregular menstruation, elevated levels of ‘male’ hormones, excess facial and body hair, and problems with glucose metabolism. Receiving a PCOS diagnosis can be a disorienting experience. This article focuses on this medical condition to explore the role of different digital technologies in managing women’s health across public and private domains. Relying on seventeen semi-structured interviews with Danish women, I  suggest that self-tracking mobile applications and social media provide PCOS patients with different modes of caring and drawing boundaries between public and private. Whereas applications are designed according to the capitalist logic of paying to manage your health and fitness, so-cial media offer solidarity and mutual care. This article elucidates how patients use self-track-ing apps and social media to make sense of their unique configurations of symptoms, often without any connection to their clinical visits and communication with medical providers. I employ Annemarie Mol’s theory of the logic of choice vs the logic of care and the notion of ‘social-material networks of biosensing’ by Mette Kragh-Furbo et. al. to argue that social media partially compensate for the inadequacy of self-tracking apps for handling PCOS and offer care and solidarity through the sharing of personal stories.

Keywords: polycystic ovary syndrome, self-tracking apps, social media, the logic of choice, the logic of care, social-material networks

Received: August 11, 2024; Revised: June 4, 2025; Accepted: June 16, 2025; Prepublished online: August 26, 2025; Published: August 31, 2025  Show citation