Alzbeta Hajkova

Femtech refers to a growing range of technologies that aim to address health needs typically associated with women’s bodies, such as maternal health, fertility, menstruation, sexual wellness, or contraception. We examine a specific popular femtech product, cycle tracking apps, as an instrument of self-surveillance for greater productivity. Our analysis is grounded in the phenomenology of temporality—we understand workplace surveillance technologies as advancing an internalized sense of time discipline, generating a personal experience of time as a constant call to improve one’s workplace productivity. We then examine how the same dynamic reveals itself in the vocabulary and functionality of popular cycle-tracking apps. Our paper contributes to the existing feminist critiques of femtech, namely, the examination of cycle-tracking apps as promoting a false sense of empowerment and separating users from self-knowledge of their bodies. We argue that cycle-tracking apps perpetuate the attitude that menstruators need to manage their cycle for the sake of reliable participation in productivity demands, creating a disconnect between their internal experience of the temporality of menstruation and external pressures.

The present paper examines the possibility of political action in Hannah Arendt’s philosophical framework under the circumstance of oppression. I first analyze Arendt’s concepts of self-display and self-presentation in The Life of the Mind as they map onto her division of the human condition into social and political spheres. While society as a realm of self-display provides an outlet for natural human differences, politics is a space for our self-presentation, that is, our chosen way of appearing to others as their equals via action. Since action is the most important—and consequently broad— category in Arendt, I zoom in on what constitutes specifically political action and argue that the character of political action in Arendt is helpful in our thinking about present-day social and political justice movements. However, I point out that two aspects of Arendt’s system complicate the idea of political action as an instrument that should be accessible to everyone. I title these problems as the “denial of self-display” and “denial of self-presentation.” I argue that to overcome these limitations of Arendt’s framework, we must first recognize that for oppressed groups, navigating both the social and political obstacles involves sacrifices and risks that already constitute political action. Second, we need to understand that our “given” self-displaying identities can become instruments of political action in the Arendtian sense under the circumstances of oppression and discrimination, as embracing them is to embrace the spontaneity and uncertainty of political action.