ETHICx would like to invite you also to another Ethics & Coffee event with Alzbeta Hajkova (Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the School of Public Policy ) and Tom Doyle (Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Bioethics, Indiana University): Hacking the Cycle: Femtech, Internalized Surveillance, and Productivity.
Femtech refers to a range of technologies that address health needs typically associated with women’s bodies, such as maternal health, fertility, menstruation, sexual wellness, or contraception. Our talk will examine a specific popular femtech product, cycle-tracking applications, as instruments of self-surveillance. We first discuss the relationship between technology and the experience of individual temporarility. Specifically, we focus on the relationship between surveillance workplace technologies and a sense of time-discipline as an internalized drive toward increased worker productivity. We then apply this framework to the analysis of cycle-tracking apps, arguing that cycle-tracking apps perpetuate the attitude that the menstruator needs to manage their cycle for the sake of reliable participation in productivity, creating a disconnect between their internal experience of the temporality of menstruation and external pressures. Our critique contributes to the existing worries surrounding femtech—namely, the understanding of cycle-tracking apps as selling a false sense of women empowerment and separating users, under the guise of science, from self-knowledge of their bodies.
Thursday, November 30, from 11am to noon.
Location(s):
In-person: Conference room 115 of the Savant Building.
Online: https://bit.ly/3uqQ4rm
For questions: michael.hoffmann@pubpolicy.gatech.edu