scholarly journals SELF-TRACKING ‘FEMTECH’: COMMODIFYING & DISCIPLINING THE FERTILE FEMALE BODY

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Roetman
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Female Body ◽  
The Body ◽  
Smart Devices ◽  
Feminine Subjectivity ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Health And Wellbeing ◽  
Fertile Female ◽  
User Data

This paper engages with feminist political economists to explore questions of affective labour and value-production in self-tracking technologies designed for the female body (‘femtech’). Self-tracking femtech is largely characterised by smartphone applications and smart devices that track user data relating to menstruation, fertility periods, sexual activity, ovulation, hormones, and health and wellbeing. This data can be collected through self-reporting or through automated transmission from sensory devices attached to the body. By reflecting on my own experiences with these technologies, this paper argues that users of self-tracking femtech perform the labour of reproducing our bodies and our affective relations in ways that are amenable to both capitalist and patriarchal structures of power. Situated within the broader shifts of care and social reproduction, self-tracking femtech can be understood as affective infrastructures that re-stabilise gender norms and continue to unevenly push the burden of reproduction onto a class of unpaid women. I explore the ways that affective experiences are shaped and modulated by self-trackers to (re)produce and discipline the fertile and sexual female body to be $2 a productive labouring body and heterosexually attractive feminine subjectivity. The labour of reproduction is further intertwined here with the labour of producing data for digital media industries that generates profit in the advertising marketplace. By examining co-constitutive and paradoxical forms of value at play, I dually situate self-tracking femtech within broader political struggles and locate the spaces of agency in our everyday entanglements with digital media technologies.

scholarly journals Digital action campaigns in the global public sphere

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jumoke Giwa
Keyword(s):  
Civic Engagement ◽  
New Media ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
The Body ◽  
Cultural Issues ◽  
Gender Based Violence ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
New Media Technologies

<p>This research project undertakes a critical analysis of the use of new media technologies by community activists engaging in local and global communities. Increasingly, community organizations are using digital media to augment their various activities and conduct campaigns. I will consider this development with regard to WorldPulse.com, a global organization whose aim is to foster and facilitate civic engagement. More specifically, the website attempts to function and serve as a global public sphere and vehicle for the expression and discussion of political, social and cultural issues relevant to women. The analysis conducted in this thesis focuses on the website’s digital action campaigns on gender-based violence, girl child education, and women’s access to technology between 2012 and 2014, and its ‘Voices of Our Future’ citizen journalism training program.  This project employs digital ethnographic methods using content and discourse analysis, participant observation, online web survey, semi-structured email interviews and a researcher’s journal to examine the potential of worldpulse.com to serve as a global public sphere for women. The research makes use of critical studies theories and data triangulation methodologies in order to identify and evaluate if, and to what extent, the site facilitates public sphere activity and activism. I have developed an inductive typology to assess levels and kinds of civic engagement that is enabled and augmented by the interconnection of online and offline advocacy. This thesis aims to contribute to the body of scholarly literature researching and evaluating the extent to which new media technologies enable and facilitate public sphere engagement.</p>

scholarly journals Subjektiwiteit en vroulike liggaamlikheid in enkele tekste van Riana Scheepers en Antjie Krog

Literator ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-122
Author(s):  
A. Visagie
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Female Body ◽  
The Body ◽  
Helene Cixous ◽  
Luce Irigaray ◽  
Female Subjectivity ◽  
Feminine Subjectivity ◽  
Female Speaker

Subjectivity and feminine corporeality in texts by Riana Scheepers and Antjie KrogBoth Die ding in die vuur by Riana Scheepers and Gedigte 1989-1995 by Antjie Krog are characterized by a profound interest in women in relation to their bodies. As Luce Irigaray (1981:100) and Héléne Cixous (1981:256) have indicated, it is essential to approach the debate about female subjectivity from the discourse of the body. Irigaray believes that women will accede to subjectivity from an experience of their bodies as multiple and diverse. In the short stories of Riana Scheepers the bodies of women are depicted as confiscated and destroyed by the discourses of both African and Western patriarchy. However, the writing of Scheepers does not mobilize the constructive potential of the female body to create a new subjectivity. In her poetry Antjie Krog engages the female body in a transitory exploration of the masculine other. An analysis of “ek staan op 'n moerse rots langs the see by Paternoster" leads to the conclusion that the female speaker in this poem by Krog emerges from her non-appropriating journey through the masculine other within sight o f a feminine subjectivity based on the liberating potential of the female body.

scholarly journals MOVE, EAT, SLEEP, REPEAT: RHYTHMIC STRUGGLES IN PROACTIVE SELF-TRACKING PRACTICES

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harley Bergroth ◽  
Minna Saariketo
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
The Body ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Activity Tracking ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
Technical Systems ◽  
Tracking Devices

In this paper, we trace the rhythmicities of activity tracking by applying the method of technograhical collaborative autoethnography (cf. Bucher, 2012; Chang, Hernandez & Ngunjiri, 2012). The focus is on on proactive self-tracking that has become a proliferating digital media practice involving the gathering of data about the body and one’s everyday patterns of being outside the context of clinical health care. In the paper, we address the gap that still exists in research of exploring the mechanisms by and through which the human-technology attachments operate in practice. Drawing from a new materialist understanding of media technologies combined with Lefebvrian rhytmanalysis, we focus on the rhythmic aspects of self-tracking by asking how specific self-tracking devices and interfaces attract and prescribe repetition, rhythms, beats, pulses, and cycles into everyday lives. In so doing, we elaborate how human bodies and technical systems of self-tracking interact rhythmically. The analysis sheds light on the rhythms and beats that we interpret as illustrations of the ’technological unconscious’ (Thrift & French, 2002). We bring our observations in dialogue with the contemporary critical arguments pointing to the design of products that are made as addictive as possible in the race for ‘hijacking minds’ and capturing attention. Our research contributes empirically to the lack of research that has systematically examined these seductive and yet controlling properties of software, and complements the theory of rhythmanalysis with theorization on the hierarchical organisation of rhythms and related power dynamics in the digital context.

scholarly journals Digital action campaigns in the global public sphere

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jumoke Giwa
Keyword(s):  
Civic Engagement ◽  
New Media ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
The Body ◽  
Cultural Issues ◽  
Gender Based Violence ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
New Media Technologies

<p>This research project undertakes a critical analysis of the use of new media technologies by community activists engaging in local and global communities. Increasingly, community organizations are using digital media to augment their various activities and conduct campaigns. I will consider this development with regard to WorldPulse.com, a global organization whose aim is to foster and facilitate civic engagement. More specifically, the website attempts to function and serve as a global public sphere and vehicle for the expression and discussion of political, social and cultural issues relevant to women. The analysis conducted in this thesis focuses on the website’s digital action campaigns on gender-based violence, girl child education, and women’s access to technology between 2012 and 2014, and its ‘Voices of Our Future’ citizen journalism training program.  This project employs digital ethnographic methods using content and discourse analysis, participant observation, online web survey, semi-structured email interviews and a researcher’s journal to examine the potential of worldpulse.com to serve as a global public sphere for women. The research makes use of critical studies theories and data triangulation methodologies in order to identify and evaluate if, and to what extent, the site facilitates public sphere activity and activism. I have developed an inductive typology to assess levels and kinds of civic engagement that is enabled and augmented by the interconnection of online and offline advocacy. This thesis aims to contribute to the body of scholarly literature researching and evaluating the extent to which new media technologies enable and facilitate public sphere engagement.</p>

Men’s Hunger, Food Consumption, and Preferences for Female Body Types

2014 ◽  
Vol 45 (6) ◽  
pp. 495-497 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolas Guéguen
Keyword(s):  
Food Consumption ◽  
Female Body ◽  
The Body ◽  
Slender Body ◽  
Mediation Effect ◽  
Point Scale ◽  
Body Type ◽  
Experimental Conditions

Nelson and Morrison (2005 , study 3) reported that men who feel hungry preferred heavier women. The present study replicates these results by using real photographs of women and examines the mediation effect of hunger scores. Men were solicited while entering or leaving a restaurant and asked to report their hunger on a 10-point scale. Afterwards, they were presented with three photographs of a woman in a bikini: One with a slim body type, one with a slender body type, and one with a slightly chubby body. The participants were asked to indicate their preference. Results showed that the participants entering the restaurant preferred the chubby body type more while satiated men preferred the thinner or slender body types. It was also found that the relation between experimental conditions and the choices of the body type was mediated by men’s hunger scores.

Coda: The Rosetta Stone

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Digital Code ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Rosetta Stone ◽  
The World ◽  
Western Imagination ◽  
Origin Point

Hieroglyphs have persisted for so long in the Western imagination because of the malleability of their metaphorical meanings. Emblems of readability and unreadability, universality and difference, writing and film, writing and digital media, hieroglyphs serve to encompass many of the central tensions in understandings of race, nation, language and media in the twentieth century. For Pound and Lindsay, they served as inspirations for a more direct and universal form of writing; for Woolf, as a way of treating the new medium of film and our perceptions of the world as a kind of language. For Conrad and Welles, they embodied the hybridity of writing or the images of film; for al-Hakim and Mahfouz, the persistence of links between ancient Pharaonic civilisation and a newly independent Egypt. For Joyce, hieroglyphs symbolised the origin point for the world’s cultures and nations; for Pynchon, the connection between digital code and the novel. In their modernist interpretations and applications, hieroglyphs bring together writing and new media technologies, language and the material world, and all the nations and languages of the globe....

‘Good enough for a spot of lippy anyway’: Rape and the Body Politic in My Brother Tom

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 358-373
Author(s):  
Louise Wilks
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Abuse ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sexual Violation ◽  
Female Protagonist ◽  
British Cinema ◽  
Hollywood Movies ◽  
Contemporary Cinema ◽  
Rape Narratives

The representation of rape continues to be one of the most highly charged issues in contemporary cinema, and whilst many discussions of this topic focus on Hollywood movies, sexual violation is also a pervasive topic in British cinema. This article examines the portrayal of a female's rape in the British feature My Brother Tom (2001), a powerful and often troubling text in which the sexual violation of the teenage female protagonist functions as a catalyst for the events that comprise the plot, as is often the case in rape narratives. The article provides an overview of some of the key feminist academic discussions and debates that cinematic depictions of rape have prompted, before closely analysing My Brother Tom's rape scene in relation to such discourses. The article argues that the rape scene is neither explicit nor sensationalised, and that by having the camera focus on Jessica's bewildered reactions, it positions the audience with her, and powerfully but discreetly portrays the grave nature of sexual abuse. The article then moves on to examine the portrayal of sexual violation in My Brother Tom as a whole, considering the cultural inscriptions etched on the female body within its account of rape, before concluding with a discussion of the film's depiction of Jessica's ensuing methods of bodily self-inscription as she attempts to disassociate her body from its sexual violation.

The role of the female body in contesting and negotiating space in sports for women in rural and urban Zimbabwe

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 93-113
Author(s):  
Obert Bernard Mlambo ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
The Body ◽  
Gender Ideologies ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Girl Child ◽  
School Sports ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
Gender Ideals ◽  
A Site ◽  
Embodied Practice

This article examined attitudes, knowledge, behavior and practices of men and society on Gender bias in sports. The paper examined how the African female body was made into an object of contest between African patriarchy and the colonial system and also shows how the battle for the female body eventually extended into the sporting field. It also explored the postcolonial period and the effects on Zimbabwean society of the colonial ideals of the Victorian culture of morality. The study focused on school sports and the participation of the girl child in sports such as netball, volleyball and football. Reference was made to other sports but emphasis was given to where women were affected. It is in this case where reference to the senior women soccer team was made to provide a case study for purposes of illustration. Selected rural community and urban schools were served as case references for ethnographic accounts which provided the qualitative data used in the analysis. In terms of methodology and theoretical framework, the paper adopted the political economy of the female body as an analytical viewing point in order to examine the body of the girl child and of women in action on the sporting field in Zimbabwe. In this context, the female body is viewed as deeply contested and as a medium that functions as a site for the redirection, profusion and transvaluation of gender ideals. Using the concept of embodiment, involving demeanor, body shape and perceptions of the female body in its social context, the paper attempted to establish a connection between gender ideologies and embodied practice. The results of the study showed the prevalence of condescending attitudes towards girls and women participation in sports.

BODY PRACTICES OF WOMEN IN THE LIGHT OF FEMINIST DEBATES

2018 ◽  
pp. 129-156 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Regulation ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
Phenomenological Tradition ◽  
Academic Feminism ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
Body Practices

The paper provides an analysis of the structuralist and phenomenological traditions in interpretation of female body practices. The structuralist intellectual tradition bases its methodology on concepts from social anthropology and philosophy that see the body as ‘ordered’ by social institutions. Structuralist approaches within academic feminism are focused on critical study of the social regulation of female bodies with respect to reproduction and sexualisation (health and beauty practices). The author focuses on the dominant physical ideal of femininity and the means for body pedagogics that have been constructed by patriarchal authority. In contrast to theories of the ordered body, the phenomenological tradition is focused on the “lived” body, embodied experience, and the personal motivation and values attached to body practices. This tradition has been influenced by a variety of schools of thought including philosophical anthropology, phenomenology and action theories in sociology. Within academic feminism, there are at least three phenomenologically oriented strategies of interpretation of female body practices. The first one is centred around women’s individual situation and bodily socialization; the second one studies interrelation between body practices and the sense of the self; and the third one postulates the potential of body practices to destabilize the dominant ideals of femininity and thus provides a theoretical basis for feminist activism. The phenomenological tradition primarily analyses the motivational, symbolic and value-based components of body practices as they interact with women’s corporeality and sense of self. In general, both structuralist and phenomenological traditions complement each other by focusing on different levels of analysis of female embodiment.

“Tradition,” Vernacularism, and Learning to Be a Folk Musician With Social Media

2020 ◽  
pp. 442-466
Author(s):  
Simon Keegan-Phipps ◽  
Lucy Wright
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
Learning Mechanisms ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Arts And Humanities ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Shaping

This chapter considers the role of social media (broadly conceived) in the learning experiences of folk musicians in the Anglophone West. The chapter draws on the findings of the Digital Folk project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK), and begins by summarizing and problematizing the nature of learning as a concept in the folk music context. It briefly explicates the instructive, appropriative, and locative impacts of digital media for folk music learning before exploring in detail two case studies of folk-oriented social media: (1) the phenomenon of abc notation as a transmissive media and (2) the Mudcat Café website as an example of the folk-oriented discussion forum. These case studies are shown to exemplify and illuminate the constructs of traditional transmission and vernacularism as significant influences on the social shaping and deployment of folk-related media technologies. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the need to understand the musical learning process as a culturally performative act and to recognize online learning mechanisms as sites for the (re)negotiation of musical, cultural, local, and personal identities.

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