Beatrice Tylstedt: Making Bodies: Becoming with FemTech

Abstract

This thesis explores the becoming of bodies with FemTech – female health technologies – motivated by the widespread use of reproductive health apps for tracking menstruation, fertility, and pregnancy. Empirically, the aim is to understand the implications of FemTech for what it means to have a body, to be a body, and to exist in relation to other bodies in a time when digital technologies have fundamentally transformed how we live, act, and interact in society. Theoretically, the aim is to expand how bodies are conceptualised, understood, and designed for within Human-Computer Interaction. Underpinned by relational ontologies, entanglement theories, and Karen Barad’s agential realism, this thesis approaches bodies as emerging relationally with technologies. It asks what bodies become with FemTech. Using thematic literature review, qualitative interviews, app walkthrough method, and autoethnography, it explores this question through five empirical studies which capture FemTech as phenomenon, the perspectives of developers and users, and the design of these technologies. Synthesising the findings from the empirical studies, I show how bodies emerge as what I call cyclic-reproductive with FemTech. Through intra-action with FemTech the body becomes a cyclic-reproductive force, an agency in itself. As the body becomes cyclic-reproductive it gains new meaning, lived experiences are reinterpreted, and the relationship between subject and body is transformed. The cyclic-reproductive body emerges as an agency that is ever-present and boundless, yet distinct from the subject. It becomes something that users cannot completely grasp or know, while remaining ever-present in their lives. In a concluding discussion, I argue that in order to understand what humans become with technologies, we must move beyond viewing technologies as fixed, designed artefacts and instead understand them as emergent phenomena that make particular constitutions of humans possible and impossible. Understanding bodies differently is to take responsibility in the mattering of bodies through design and technology, and I encourage researchers to think with entanglement theories in a pragmatic stretching and unstretching to make alternative perspectives on technologies visible and new worlds possible.