FemTech

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 women’s 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.

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? 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