Document Type
Article
Abstract
Emerging as a commercial category in 2016, ‘femtech’ has been publicly celebrated as a category of consumer-based digital health technologies designed to support the unmet and systemically marginalized health needs of women in areas such as menstruation, fertility, pregnancy, postpartum, and menopause, through data-driven apps, wearables, and self-diagnostic tools. Since its emergence, the term femtech has become culturally significant and has taken on a life of its own across commercial, public, and healthcare discourses. Despite the growth of femtech scholarship, clarity is lacking on how different disciplines have challenged the assumptions about sex, gender, health, technology, and innovation that shape dominant understandings of ‘who’ femtech is for (i.e. fem) and ‘what’ it constitutes (i.e. tech). Motivated by this research gap, a critical conceptual review was conducted to provide new entry points into critical debates. This article novelly adapts ‘diffractive reading’ as a methodological approach to bring disciplinary perspectives on femtech into conversation with one another across anthropology, computer science, cultural studies, gender studies, information studies, law, media studies, medicine, and science and technology studies. This article focuses on insights drawn between critiques of femtech which trouble the ideologies, discourses, and practices that shape dominant understandings of ‘fem’ and ‘tech’. In thinking through and with the conceptual boundaries of femtech, this review underscores the ongoing need to examine femtech’s role in shaping global dynamics of reproductive, labor, and environmental justice, in addition to neoliberal approaches to healthcare more broadly.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Publication Info
Published in Health United Kingdom, 2025.
APA Citation
Facca, D., Hall, J., Teachman, G., Redden, J., & Donelle, L. (2025). Femtech in context: A critical conceptual (re)view. Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine.https://doi.org/10.1177/13634593251371327
Rights
© The Author(s) 2025. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage)