Abstract
This paper explores the ways in which communications are increasingly being created, disseminated, and received by and through the body, and often in intimate and relational ways, leading to a recognition of the body as a communications platform. Platforms are no longer things external to us, hand-held or screen mediated; instead, they are now embedded, both literally and figuratively in our lives and bodies. Concerns over how bodies are increasingly leveraged in social, cultural, and political forms of communication such as news and social media suggests that the body (and the intersectionally raced, classed, and gendered body in particular) is not only a site of contestation, politics, and biopower, but is a platform – producing data assemblages that are bought and fought over in ways that make a “medium” (to borrow from McLuhan) out of the body itself. In what follows, then, I turn to the relationship between bodies and selves, and the burgeoning industry of feminine health technologies (i.e., “FemTech”) such as menstruation and ovulation trackers as a particularly fraught domain of the platform economy. This contribution, then, explores three interrelated critiques of platform intimacy in the context of reproductive tracking technologies I organize this critique around the central theme of biometric tracking to ask a series of questions: How is the body leveraged as a platform for intimate surveillance? To what extent do biopolitics and governmentality reproduce through body platforms? And what happens when the promises of digital intimacies collapse into patriarchy, data brokerage, or even violence?
Presenters
Lindsay BalfourSr Lecturer in Communications, School of Critical Studies, University of Glasgow, Glasgow City, United Kingdom
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Platform; Intimacies; Gender; Health; Communications Technology
