This 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.
1. 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? FemTechs 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 (doesnt) 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. 13. Using and Interpreting FemTech data:
(Self-)knowledge, empowerment, and sovereignty - Stefano Canali and
Chris Hesselbein.
Lindsay Anne Balfour is Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University. She is an experienced researcher, public speaker, and author with international experience in the non-profit sector and formal academia. Her research draws on Feminist Science and Technology Studies to examine the relationship between Feminine Technologies (FemTech) and the forms of knowledge and experience produced by and about womens bodies. Her work offers wider benefits concerning the global health of women, such as those outlined in the UN Sustainable Development Goals regarding Women and Girls, and in particular targets focusing on sexual and reproductive health.
