Wearing an Ostomy Pouch and Becoming an Ostomate: A Kairological Approach to Wearability

Abstract

In both popular and scholarly discourse, wearable technologies are characterized primarily as technologies that quantify, providing wearers with new knowledge about themselves and their environments. Such limited characterizations do not fully engage technologies that are, indeed, wearable but do not simply quantify. This essay argues that wearability encompasses rhetorical work beyond that of popular, mainstream technologies like fitness trackers and sleep monitors. Using Judy Segal’s “kairology,” this essay traces five ostomy pouch narratives—focusing on narratives of empowerment and constraint and analyzing competing experiences of wearing and the divergent identifications those experiences support. The essay concludes with preliminary insights into how kairology is well-suited to help researchers tease out the dynamic processes between wearer and technology, as well as the identities that those processes make possible.

Keywords:

• kairology
• ostomy
• rhetoric of technology
• rhetoric of wearability
• wearable technology

Acknowledgment

The author has provided appropriate documentation, demonstrating Institutional Review Board approval for her human subjects study from the University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee.

Notes

¹ For a few prominent examples, see, Deborah Lupton; Sungmee Park and Sundaresan Jayaraman; Mitesh S.,Patel, David A. Asch, and Kevin G. Volpp; Melanie Swan; and Emily Waltz.

² See Anne Balsamo; Dave Clark; Donna J. Haraway; John W. Jordan; Koerber; and Kim Toffoletti.

³ IBD refers primarily to two autoimmune diseases that affect the digestive tract—Crohn’s Disease and Ulcerative Colitis.

⁴ Acute wounds and conditions can also be cause for ostomy surgery.

⁵ A colostomy bag is a specific type of ostomy pouch, used when all or part of the colon is removed.

⁶ Scholarship on ostomy stigma and the psychosocial implications of undergoing ostomy surgery is expansive. See, for example, Anne Kjaergaard Danielsen et al.; Robin S. McLeod et al.; and Dylan M. Smith et al.

⁷ I draw on findings from an ongoing study including five, 60-minute interviews and a nation-wide survey of self-identified women who either have IBD and or wear ostomy pouches, and more than 200 hours of field observations with ostomy pouch wearers to triangulate and further understand the highly complex relationships between wearers and worn technologies.

⁸ For example, see Barad; Dolmage; Hobbs; Mol; Salibrici; Triece.