Reality Harvester, Data After Nature After Nature. Skoden, 2022. 

Femtech (or female technology) is a term applied to a category of software, diagnostics, products, and services that use technology often to focus on women’s health. As an industry, Femtech largely encompasses any digital or standard health tools aimed at women’s health, including wearables, internet-connected forms of contraception. Fertility and menstruation tracking apps, or FMTS are used to track menstrual cycles and ovulation patterns, and comprise a calendar overview of the user’s menstrual cycle and recording of the user’s symptoms, feelings and activities.  There are currently estimated to be around 1,323 companies related to Fem Tech. Femtech as an industry is estimated to be worth 40 billion US dollars in 2020, and is projected to be worth as much as 75 billion US dollars by 2025, with an estimated 13.3% increase in profitability yearly. As a case study, it calls to question how gender, and topics related to sexuality are presented online and in online marketplaces, the economization of ‘the natural’ in new media, and the visual cultures attached to body optimization . What is the future of health care in a political-economy increasingly shaped by digital platforms, machine learning and user personalization? 

The evolving industry of Femtech, the aesthetics of platform imaginaries, the protocols of self-managerialism conveyed through the visual culture of individual aspiration; the ambiguous line between ‘participation’ and the extraction of unpaid labour, and all the traces of the techno-social – cluster together into the entangled world of digital contraception. The long-standing relationship between reproduction (in its many forms), and the accumulating cogs of capitalism with its nascent (and rebellious?) techno-accelerators, layer together into a perplexing, infuriating, complicating, bleeding land of Femtech. What to make of the ‘reproductive’ sphere of platform capitalism?

 

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