Who is FemTech for? Intersectional Interventions

Abstracts

Towards the Future of Ethical Femtech and Women’s Digital Health

Najd AlFawzan, Institute of Biomedical Ethics and History of Medicine, University of Zurich

FemTech, or female-focused technology, has emerged as a promising area for improving women's health outcomes. However, there are significant gaps in FemTech research and access that disproportionately affect marginalized communities, such as racialized and low-income women. Additionally, the knowledge and experiences produced through medical and cultural discourses regarding women's bodies can perpetuate inequalities in women's digital health. 

Due to sociocultural factors, women’s health-related information is considered to be taboo in some cultures. Women find themselves very vulnerable to sharing this data with family, friends, and even healthcare providers, however, they seek FemTech for help as a safe zone away from social stigma. Also, it is important to consider the intimacy, sensitivity, and privacy of the type of data collected by most FemTech. FemTech often collects and use data related to reproductive health, fertility, pregnancy, and other women's health issue.

Moreover, FemTech companies provide services to the global market. This raises challenges that can be in conflict both with cultural traditions and local legislation. Therefore, as FemTech continues to evolve, it is essential to consider how these technologies can impact women's lives, as well as the broader societal implications. Ethical FemTech involves not only creating innovative and effective products but also taking into account the potential social and ethical impacts of these technologies. In short, in our paper, we talk about the future solutions for ethical FemTech. For instance, we discuss issues like privacy by design, inclusivity, user-centered design, medical accuracy, and social responsibility.

Who is FemTech for? Intersectional Interventions  

Lindsay Balfour, Coventry University

This panel draws from cultural studies and feminist science and technology studies to offer a timely and exiting 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”). Whether a lack of critical literacy around digital health, design and aesthetic impediments, the reality that women’s symptoms and pain are not taken seriously, or the fact that most FemTech products still presume a white, middle class, heterosexual, reproductive, and able-bodied user, it is problematic that women (particularly those in underserved or emerging markets) still have unequal access to basic reproductive healthcare and women’s health technologies (Wiese, 2021). This panel aims to explore FemTech within the context of Feminist Science and Technology Studies (FTST), whereby the entanglements of race, class, gender, ability, sexuality and other social and cultural identities are brought to the fore. If STS is inherently the consideration of the creation, development, and consequences of science and technology in their historical, cultural, and social contexts, then this panel asks, to borrow in part from Sara Díaz, “what role can technoscience play in the movements to achieve gender justice?” and how are the operations of power and privileged exacerbated and challenged within the women’s digital health milleu? (2020). In other words: Who is FemTech for?

Tracking with a reproductive disorder: a complicated picture of justice through FemTech

Sarah Ho, University of Cambridge

Reproductive disorders, such as endometriosis and premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD), have routinely been neglected in practices of scientific knowledge-making. Menstrual tracking apps aim to address this epistemic injustice, for example, by creating pathways for the collection of menstrual data for research. On this account, menstrual tracking technologies promote the broader goals of the FemTech movement, which seeks to correct ‘patriarchal operations of power’ in science and healthcare.

Responding to the panel’s call for explorations of the intersectional, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork with women diagnosed with endometriosis and PMDD in the UK and examine their tracking practices through a lens of knowledge-production as understood by the women themselves. The lived experience of tracking complicates the picture of justice. This paper explores how tracking consists of affective practices and deliberations that constitute, on the one hand, a successful and embodied form of knowledge-making at the frontier of  understandings about these disorders; and, on the other, labour that is denied legitimacy and resisted against in the context of public healthcare that women deem to be failing them. I argue that tracking technologies affect interactions between women and medical professionals, at times enabling communication but also complicit in instilling women’s vulnerability. We will see that FemTech emerges as an ‘ecosystem’ of solutions and optimism as perceived by medical professionals and patients, as well as an organising principle drawing together the efforts and aspirations of different people into the same space. Though one might ask – whose bodies and ideologies are still left behind?) 

STS and the medicalization of the fat body

Katrine Meldgaard Kjær, IT University of Copenhagen

Fertility Disrupted: Where FemTech Meets FinTech

Liz Montegary, Stony Brook University / State University of New York

This paper takes as its starting point the rapid rise in the number of startup companies trying to “disrupt” the fertility industry. Specifically, I am interested in the companies emerging at the nexus of “FemTech” and “FinTech” (the sector offering alternatives to traditional financial services and banking institutions). Generally speaking, the “innovations” these startups offer have little to do with developing new treatments or knowledges; rather, these companies purport to revolutionize access to assisted reproductive technologies by offering prospective parents flexible financing plans and family-building lines of credit.

By situating these recent innovations within the longer history of fertility lending in the United States, my article examines the intersections between consumer finance and reproductive medicine and, in doing so, addresses a gap in the existing literature on the digitization, consumerization, and financialization of social reproduction. Moreover, I approach fertility lending as a salient entry point into studying what Michelle Murphy calls “distributed reproduction” – that is, for theorizing reproduction beyond the individual to include all our relations, human and nonhuman alike, and our responsibilities to biological and environmental life. Pushing back against a reproductive politics organized around a rights-based rhetoric of consumer and biomedical “choice,” this essay maps the complex financial and technological infrastructures that make – and take – life at the bodily and populational level. Crucially, I hold out the possibility of imagining “FertilityTech” otherwise – for envisioning uses of technology that would move us toward gender and sexual liberation and foster life in racially, ecologically, and economically just ways.

Fertile Becoming:  Reproductive Temporalities with/in Tracking Technologies

Lara Reime, IT University of Copenhagen; with Marisa Cohn; Vasiliki Tsaknaki

Bodies concerned with infertility increasingly engage in processes of datafication and sense-making either through self-tracking technologies and/or through medical treatment. Developments in reproductive health, such as IVF or Assisted Reproduction, do not only reconfigure which bodies can be understood as reproductive but also remake complex temporal narratives of reproduction. In our contribution, we focus on the ways Menstruation and Fertility Tracking Apps (MFTAs) become entangled in such broader configurations of reproductive time.  

We scrutinize how MFTAs represent, organize, and narrate reproductive time for the user. For example, the vast amount of MFTAs promise increased self-knowledge of one’s reproductive potential by collecting intimate data and rendering this data into future predictions of fertile windows. In that they shape experiences of time as people manage their expectations towards such calculations. Through such suggestive timings, they also shape what is “good timing” for reproduction both at a moment in a particular cycle, as well as throughout one’s life course. Hence, MFTAs are presenting (normative) timelines to act upon possible reproductive potential. 

We further discuss how people navigate these limitations and normativities of objective data representations. We surface how their lived experiences entail more vulnerable and non-linear temporalities, opposed to the linear and progressive representations narrated through MFTAs. Thus, the complexity of reproductive temporalities often exceeds what these apps can represent. We further reflect on examples of how users collectively navigate these reduced and reinforced temporal norms and point towards the different entangled modes of making and understanding time within reproductive sense-making.

FemTech in (and for) Emerging Markets: Narratives from Kenya

Sarah Seddig, Danish Institute for International Studies & University of Copenhagen

Health Apps, Genetic Diets and Superfoods

Tina Sikka, Newcastle University

Between Liberation and Control: Mixing Methods to Investigate How users experience Menstrual Cycle Tracking Applications

Lisa Stuifzand, Dutch Government / University of Groningen; with Rik Smit

Menstrual cycle tracking applications (MCTAS) are marketed as tools of empowerment. They help menstruators to better understand their cycle and (re)gain control over their bodies. However, embedded in those applications are discourses and taboos from biomedical, neoliberal, and patriarchal power systems. This thesis highlights how these power systems are embedded in the design of MCTAs and how these are reflected in the users' experiences. The research is done through a unique mixed-methods approach, combining quantitative automated content analysis on Reddit data with qualitative analysis of focus group data.

Tailored FemTech and Bespoke Microbes

Megan Tracy, James Madison University; with Rebecca Howes-Mischel

Focusing on technologies that extract, sequence, and “make with” human microbes, this paper approaches FemTech via capitalizable projects aimed at harnessing the generative effects of human microbes. Rather than familiar FemTech that leverages biodata and computational surveillance, these projects yoke technoscientific understandings of gendered human:microbe interdependence to techno promises of consumer products aimed at disrupting gendered inequities. From taking control of one’s vaginal wellness to creating breastmilk outside the breast, we follow female-founded and venture capital-backed biotech companies that commercialize gendered bodily materials while employing a language of empowerment to liberate their potential consumers from gendered care concerns. We take a critical approach to analyzing how they produce their own niche and analyze how they speak to a broader need to enable self-care and inject an intersectional-esque sensibility to their bespoke solutions. 

After first evaluating how the body itself becomes a kind of FemTech, at once an instrument of microbial surveillance and mobilized to create the products of its own liberation, we turn to the questions: for whom and for what are they for? Situated within 1970s feminist imaginings of the emancipatory possibilities of removing reproductive labor from reproductive bodies alongside longer histories of exploiting differently raced and classed bodies, we also ask the yet unresolved question of emancipatory for whom? We conclude by analyzing how these companies both leverage an intersectional lens in their visual rhetorics of the gendered health gap and yet also decouple themselves from the raced and classed histories from which they extend.