Communication Design Quarterly Sep 2024 Open Access

Biodigital Literacy through Intimate Data: User Perceptions of FemTech and Pelvic Floor Training Devices

Haley Swartz Clemson University

Abstract

The FemTech industry, a booming segment of the health technology market, trades in feminist empowerment largely by data tracking and collection. As issues of privacy and surveillance related to users' data collection have grown, scholars in health, design, and communication have explored how health-related technologies complicate the liberatory potential of self-tracking and self-monitoring health, signaling digitally collected, intimate data as concerning and gesturing toward critical digital literacy as a requirement for technology users. By analyzing user comments about pelvic floor training devices, this article reframes intimate data to understand the ways that people create and use it to learn about themselves. This move demonstrates a new kind of literacy: biodigital literacy, which I offer as a concept and framework that highlights the unique competencies of embodied digital life.

Journal
Communication Design Quarterly
Published
2024-09-01
DOI
10.1145/3563890.3713051
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Topics
digital rhetoric literacy studies gender and writing
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