‘There’s only so much data you can handle in your life’: accommodating and resisting self-surveillance in women’s running and fitness tracking practices

ABSTRACT

The widespread use of Fitbits, Garmins and Apple Watches is emblematic of the ‘Quantified Self’ (QS) movement, where participants utilise digital self-tracking devices to generate a broad range of data on their health and fitness for the purposes of self-improvement. Gendered expectations for beauty and health have led to women becoming disproportionately represented amongst fitness tracker wearers, as weight loss and self-discipline for the purposes of beauty are often considered women’s endeavours. To examine the gendered ways in which wearable technologies are utilised in fitness practices, I look to ‘running interviews’ and semi-structured interviews with 10 women who identify as self-tracking runners to better apprehend the ways in which self-surveillance through a fitness tracking device is both accommodated and resisted. Drawing on a Foucauldian conceptual framework of surveillance, discipline and technologies of femininity, I describe four strategies of resistance to datafication: labelling some data as excessive, not tracking every run or every day, invoking one’s humanity and fallibility as a way of limiting disappointment from unfavourable data, and re-valuing feelings over data. While these self-trackers have undergone this process of problematisation and deemed this level of self-surveillance to be an important part of what they see as a healthy lifestyle, they do not fully accept practices of dataism, optimisation and technologies of femininity, entirely.

KEYWORDS:

• Quantified self
• Foucault
• surveillance
• sociology of sport
• technologies of femininity

Biographical Note

Katelyn Esmonde is a doctoral candidate in Physical Cultural Studies in the Department of Kinesiology at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research focuses on gender, feminism, science and technology studies, theories of physical culture, and qualitative methods. Her research has focused on the Quantified Self movement across physical culture.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Drs. Shannon Jette, David L. Andrews, Cheryl Cooky, Adam Beissel, Jason Farman, and Zack Beauchamp for their comments on earlier versions of this paper. She is also grateful to her research participants who took the time to run with her and share their stories and lives, and the anonymous reviewers and editors of this journal who provided invaluable, thoughtful, and patient feedback o this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. While the group that was interviewed is fairly privileged through social class and education, these privileges align them typical fitness tracker users (NPD Connected Intelligence 2015).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [Doctoral Award]; the Graduate School, University of Maryland [Flagship Fellowship]; the Graduate School, University of Maryland [Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowship.

Notes on contributors

Katelyn Esmonde

Katelyn Esmonde is a doctoral candidate in Physical Cultural Studies in the Department of Kinesiology at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research focuses on gender, feminism, science and technology studies, theories of physical culture, and qualitative methods. Her research has focused on the Quantified Self movement across physical culture.