Barbies, Goddesses, and Entrepreneurs: Discourses of Gendered Digital Embodiment in Women’s Health Apps

Doshi, Marissa Joanna

doi:10.1080/07491409.2018.1463930

Cited by 19 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 43 publications

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“…Also, apps for women largely ignored user diversity, depicting White, thin, young, middle-class women. 37 The language and topics that health apps use are also gendered. We became aware of this through our own text-messaging study to increase physical activity in university students in the San Francisco Bay Area of the USA.…”

Section: Biases In Health App User Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

The need for feminist intersectionality in digital health

Figueroa

Luo

Aguilera

et al. 2021

The Lancet Digital Health

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Digital health, including the use of mobile health apps, telemedicine, and data analytics to improve health systems, has surged during the COVID-19 pandemic. The social and economic fallout from COVID-19 has further exacerbated gender inequities, through increased domestic violence against women, soaring unemployment rates in women, and increased unpaid familial care taken up by women-all factors that can worsen women's health. Digital health can bolster gender equity through increased access to health care, empowerment of one's own health data, and reduced burden of unpaid care work. Yet, digital health is rarely designed from a gender equity perspective. In this Viewpoint, we show that because of lower access and exclusion from app design, gender imbalance in digital health leadership, and harmful gender stereotypes, digital health is disadvantaging women-especially women with racial or ethnic minority backgrounds. Tackling digital health's gender inequities is more crucial than ever. We explain our feminist intersectionality framework to tackle digital health's gender inequities and provide recommendations for future research.

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Section: Biases In Health App User Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

The need for feminist intersectionality in digital health

Figueroa

Luo

Aguilera

et al. 2021

The Lancet Digital Health

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…As detailed elsewhere (Hamper, 2020), the privileged socio-economic positioning of participants shaped their strong sense of individual agency in navigating apps and associated health advice. The modes of selfregulation and reproductive responsibility that are advocated through pregnancy apps are underpinned by normative ideals of health, coupledom, femininity, and good mothering (Doshi, 2018;Johnson, 2014;Thomas & Lupton, 2016) that have the potential to reproduce inequalities along identity markers such as class, race, age, body size, and sexuality (McRobbie, 2015). Pregnancy apps also assume that pregnancies are wanted, leaving little space for potential ambivalence felt by prospective parents or the fact that feeling excited about prospective motherhood is not a universal experience (Rich, 1986;Tiidenberg & Baym, 2017).…”

Section: Bonding Work and Spacing Relationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bonding work: Spacing relations through pregnancy apps

Hamper

Nash

2021

Trans Inst British Geog

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Smartphone pregnancy apps, which enable their users to track a pregnancy week by week and offer advice to coincide with each stage, have transformed the spaces and times in which pregnancy information can be accessed. In this paper we draw on recent geographical work on the family, relatedness, and digitally mediated forms of intimacy, to explore how these apps figure in the embodied, emotional, and relational geographies of pregnancy. We present an analysis of visual material from pregnancy apps and interviews with women in the UK who have used them, to examine how these apps are marketed as a means to facilitate the "bonding work" of forming a close relationship with the future baby through visual images of foetal development, and related to this, how they mobilise ideas of biologically naturalised and socially normative maternal bonding. For users, however, existing and future relationships with prospective fathers and grandparents, as well as the expected baby, are practised in the spaces of everyday life through the strategic and selective sharing of pregnancy information. Our attention to the spatialities and practices of making intergenerational and parental relationships shows how users of apps respond to ideas of physical closeness in pregnancy and how this intersects with ideas of relational closeness and connection as both natural and achieved through bonding work. Women's engagements with pregnancy apps can therefore provide important insights both into the contemporary making of intimate relationships through digital technologies and geographies of parenting and pregnancy.

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“…This literature around biopolitics, neoliberalism, technology, and the quantified self is vast and well established. It spans critical work on health and health adjacent technologies, inclusive of apps and wearables (Fotopoulou and O'Riordan 2017), the critique of contemporary labour practices that center surveillance, wellness, and productivity (Moore and Robinson 2016), gender and body projects (Sanders 2017;Doshi 2018), and the embodied performance of normative citizenship (Baldwin-Philippi 2015). Deborah Lupton, the most prolific writer in this area, argues that the union of technology with biopower and neoliberalism has resulted in a culture of quantification in which health is no longer seen as the responsibility of the states, but as the domain of individuals whose behaviour and choices are dispositive (Lupton 2014).…”

Section: A Brief Political Economy Of Sleep Appsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Neoliberalization of Sleep

Sikka¹

2021

TSANTSA

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This article explores the implications of sleep apps which are sociologically significant in that they represent an attempt to colonize, exploit, and make profitable one of the last vestiges of the human lifeworld through discourses of self-subjectification, authenticity, and self-improvement. I assess the websites of two sleep tracking apps (Pillow and Sleep Score) using critical discourse analysis (CDA), new materialism, and autoethnography. I make the case that the neoliberal values associated with the use of these apps perpetuate the logic that a better sleep makes for a more productive worker, better citizen, and ideal consumer subject. I also demonstrate how these apps function to open new sites of potential profit and reproduce a form of embodied neoliberal subjectivity generated by intra-active entanglements between identities, technologies, and discourses. Finally, I take up the issue of marginalization and intersecting subject positions as it relates to inequalities that these sleep trackers might exacerbate.

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Barbies, Goddesses, and Entrepreneurs: Discourses of Gendered Digital Embodiment in Women’s Health Apps

Cited by 19 publications

References 43 publications

The need for feminist intersectionality in digital health

The need for feminist intersectionality in digital health

Bonding work: Spacing relations through pregnancy apps

The Neoliberalization of Sleep

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