The increasing measurement of life worlds and the “quantification of the self” in the present are accompanied by “new[] technologies of self-measurement” (Mau, 2018, 167). Self-tracking apps or corresponding tools are “continuously integrated into the course of life” (ibid.) under the digital condition (Stalder, 2018). This is also where the so-called menstruation apps can be classified into, which enable users to translate bodily and embodied states in relation to their menstrual cycle into data by means of predefined categories. The paper takes the phenomenon of menstruation apps as an opportunity to critically reflect on the normalization of the menstruating body in the context of sociotechnical feedback loops. In a first step, it is therefore argued that the apps with their predefined categories can be read as little tools of knowledge (Hess & Mendelsohn, 2013) that have a disciplinary effect on a subjection-theoretical and biopolitical level (Foucault, 2008) insofar as they (re-)produce conceptions of norm or ›normality‹ of menstruating bodies. The crux is: By (un)consciously making their data available, users contribute to generating ›(a-)normality‹ via socio-technical feedback loops (Chun, 2021) and are constantly confronted with having to ask themselves: Is my cycle (currently) ›normal‹? Do my ›symptoms‹ - as the app Flo calls it - correspond to what is ›normal‹ for my menstrual status? Accordingly, what might initially appear as ›personalisation‹ and thus diversification, reveals itself as normalization in the course of socio-technical feedback loops and algorithmic recommendation. Starting from this problematization, the paper concludes in a second step with critical reflections on the concept of Bildung as a “response to the possibilities of things” (Zirfas & Klepacki, 2013, 43). For while “ideas about people and their behavior are inscribed in technical objects”, it is nevertheless “only the relations in actual activity” (Allert & Asmussen, 2017, 41) within which or through which subjects are formed. In qualitative educational research we must therefore surely ask whether Bildung under the digital condition (Stalder, 2018) thus ultimately emerges at the ›edges of the (little) tools‹.

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