Australian women’s use of health and fitness apps and wearable devices: a feminist new materialism analysis

ABSTRACT

An extensive range of apps and wearable devices is available to women to monitor or improve their health and fitness. In this article, I adopt a feminist new materialism theoretical perspective to analyse interviews and focus group discussions with women who took part in The Australian Women and Digital Health Project about their use (or non-use) of these technologies. The findings identified not only the agential capacities opened up by women’s enactments with the affordances of health and fitness apps and wearable devices, but also the limitations of these technologies and the possibilities the women identified for future apps and devices. These findings highlight the tensions that can exist between the different demands that women face when attempting to conform to idealised and normative femininities and healthy citizenship. The women’s successful enactments of health apps and wearables that worked toward achieving the healthy, active, controlled body imagined by these technologies were disrupted or challenged by the demands of pregnancy, breastfeeding, chronic pain or disability or achieving the ideal of the caring mother. It is not surprising, therefore, that women imagined novel health technologies that would better cater for the diversity of their embodiment and demands of their everyday lives.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminist new materialism
• digital health
• apps
• wearable devices
• women

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for the assistance of the Women’s Centre for Health Matters in developing Study 1 of the Australian Women and Digital Health Project and helping with recruitment of participants and the community forum. I acknowledge the contribution of Miranda Bruce and Clare Southerton, who worked as participant recruiters and interviewers on Study 1, and the McCrindle Research company, which recruited participants from its panels and conducted and transcribed the Study 2 interviews.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Deborah Lupton

Deborah Lupton is SHARP Professor in the Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, UNSW Sydney, working in the Centre for Social Research in Health and the Social Policy Research Centre and leading the Vitalities Lab. She is the author/co-author of 17 books, the latest of which is Data Selves (Polity, 2019). She is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and holds an Honorary Doctor of Social Science degree awarded by the University of Copenhagen. E-mail: [email protected]