Description
Book SynopsisThis edited collection draws from cultural studies and Feminist Science and Technology Studies to offer a timely and exciting intervention into the growing field of women’s digital health. It explores the intersection of gender and embodied computing, with particular attention to access barriers and the forms of biometric surveillance that operate in wearables, ingestibles, and embeddables marketed to women (the industry generally known as “FemTech”). While the most utilized and profitable FemTech products include ovulation and fitness trackers, reproductive technologies, contraceptive microchips, and “smart” pills, this only represents a fraction of health concerns affecting women.
This volume aims to explore FemTech within the context of Feminist Science and Technology Studies, whereby the entanglements of race, class, gender, ability, sexuality and other social and cultural identities are brought to the fore. By addressing the gaps in FemTech research and socio-cultural barriers to access, this volume critiques the forms of knowledge and experience produced through medical and cultural discourses regarding women’s bodies to both highlight the inequalities in women’s digital health, and imagine alternative models which optimise technology for women in a way that is safe, accessible, and inclusive.
Table of Contents1. Introduction
Lindsay Anne Balfour
Part I: Constructing a Critical FemTech Discourse
2. “Hysteria Under Watch: Biological Essentialism and Surveillance in Menstrual Tracking Applications”
Niktalia Jules
3. “Reinventing the Beauty Myth? FemTech’s Cost to the Consumer”
Hannah Westwood
4. “Fertile Becoming: Reproductive Temporalities with/in Tracking Technologies”
Lara Reime, Marisa Cohn, Vasiliki Tsaknaki
Part II: FemTech at the Margins
5. “One Size (doesn’t) Fit All: A Closer Look at FemTech Apps and Datafied Reproductive Body Projects in India”
Paro Mishra, Ravinder Kaur, Shambhawi Vikram
6. “Artificial Intelligence and Reproducing Female Hairlessness as Social Stigma”
Georgia Roberts
7. “The Insta-Trainer: a study of how Instagram is used as a biopedagogical tool for health and wellbeing among young women in Qatar”
Sara Al Derham
8. “Hoop Dreams or Hoop Nightmares: Athletics, Fitness Tracking, and the Surveillance of the Black Body”
Rachel D. Roberson
9. “FemTech and taboo topics: Raaji as a tool for educating women in Pakistan”
Khawar Latif Khan and Farah Azhar
10. “FemTech in (and for) Emerging Markets: Narratives from Kenya”
Sarah Seddig
Part III: FemTech to (Over)come: “New Methods, Technoselves and Data Sovereignty”
11. “Wearing Danger: Surveillance, Control and Quantified Healthism in American Medicine”
Rebecca Monteleone and Ally Day
12. “Between Liberation and Control: Mixing Methods to Investigate How users experience Menstrual Cycle Tracking Applications”
Lisa Stuifzand and Rik Smit
13. “Using and Interpreting FemTech data: (Self-)knowledge, empowerment, and sovereignty”
Stefano Canali and Chris Hesselbein
