The term "female technologies" (FemTech) refers to products and services designed to address health conditions that are specific to women or affect women differently than other genders. Examples include apps for tracking menstruation and ovulation, wearables like pelvic floor trainers for pleasure or postpartum rehabilitation and telemedicine services as well as dietary supplements for menopause symptoms. While these technologies are marketed as novel, emancipatory tools for combating persistent gender inequalities in healthcare, a number of these so-called innovations closely resemble analogue techniques developed within feminist health movements since the 1970s.
This project examines FemTech at the intersection of feminist self-help traditions and the growing commercialization of female health knowledge. Early feminist practices such as self-administered abortion and communal cervix observation—still and again practiced after the overturn of Roe vs Wade—raise the question of whether they can already be considered “female technologies” in the context of a critical history of technology. At the same time, the digitalization and quantification of sensory, somatic, and communal forms of self-knowledge invites reflection on whether FemTech fosters body literacy and gender-sensitive clinical research, or instead generates new vulnerabilities, particularly concerning the security of intimate health data.
As the FemTech industry expands and becomes integrated into institutional healthcare, for example through insurance models that circulate Global North products worldwide, this project examines which forms of women’s health knowledge are being privatized, and which normative assumptions about gender and health are coded into emerging FemTech.