One Size (Doesn’t) Fit All: A Closer Look at FemTech Apps and Datafied Reproductive Body Projects in India

Abstract

Reproductive health tracking applications are one of the most commonly used forms of FemTech interventions across the world. The rapid growth of tracking applications is based on the principles of global ‘Quantified Self Movement’ (Lupton, 2016). However, existing studies on FemTech tracking applications are skewed in favour of what has been called WEIRD demographics: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. There is a need to understand self-tracking technologies in the rapidly growing FemTech industry in other cultural contexts where the population is divided on many levels: class, gender, social capital, digital access, digital literacy, language and regional locations, etc. (Epstein et al., 2017). The proposed chapter fills in this gap in the existing literature by systematically exploring the emerging FemTech landscape in India that is oriented to hormonal, sexual and reproductive health issues like menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth and menopause. The chapter is based on empirical quantitative and qualitative data gathered from reproductive health app users and other stakeholders in the FemTech landscape in India to explore everyday datafication practices and their consequences. Scholarship on the relationship between data and body has argued how data is viewed as an extension of the human form, and control over the former is often experienced as control over the latter (Patella-Rey, 2018). In such a context, the distinction between physical and datafied body becomes amorphous due to the extent to which data is used to determine and control our bodily experiences (Van der Ploeg, 2012). Using the idea of datafied ‘body projects’ (Shilling, 2003) and informed by theoretical perspectives drawn from small data approaches, the proposed chapter examines the following: How Indian users experience FemTech applications and how are these datafied body projects incorporated into concepts of health, embodiment and selfhood? Does FemTech and datafication of the reproductive body enable greater control for users? Or does it fuel newer kinds of risks, uncertainties and insecurities?

We illustrate how self-tracking practices can be both productive but also reductive and discriminatory for the users. When sexual and reproductive health behaviours and body functions are quantified, collected and shared in the form of digitised data, indicators and concepts of health risk become extremely exclusionary by creating homogenised models of the body. So, even as mobile applications are marketed as tools for control over one’s body, they can result in the erasure of diverse body types, health issues, experiences and even certain categories of persons. Thus intersectionalities of gender identity, class, religion and digital literacy among users are also papered over by one-size-fits-all apps. Further, in the Indian context, where reproduction is embroiled in familial reproductive mandates, the use of such technologies might reinforce patriarchal norms and familial surveillance. In other ways also, datafying reproductive health might result in diverse, unforeseen and sometimes detrimental outcomes for the end user, beyond the domain of data privacy and its negligence. We finally argue that while the dominant way of looking at data is through the traces it leaves and thus make populations ‘visible’, we need to be attentive to the ways in which data also invisiblizes people; how it obliterates them, their lived realities and diverse bodily experiences.