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Paper short abstract:

Unwell bodies cry out for attention, and technologies aimed at women's health attempt to attend to them. This happens in cultural and material contexts that themselves beg for attention and shape how bodies are experienced. What use is the concept of attention in making sense of this tangle?

Paper long abstract:

The burgeoning interest and investment in 'FemTech,' or digital technologies aimed at women's health, implicitly invokes attention to both bodies and the contexts in which bodies exist. Yet such ways of paying attention are not as straightforwardly complementary as they may first seem. Unwell bodies cry out for attention: for example, chronic endometriosis pain, or hormonal 'imbalances' like PCOS (polycystic ovarian syndrome) or PMDD (premenstrual dysphoric disorder). Technologies and investments can validate these problems through the attention they pay them. Yet, as in Martin's classic analysis of PMS, we should ask whether the issue is rightly in the body or in an 'imbalanced' society, given corrosive gender expectations, inhospitable economies, and pervasive chemical toxicities to which unwell bodies (could) draw attention. Technology usage can facilitate attention to one's bodily experience -- though surveillance, tracking, and pressure to 'optimize' can induce anxiety, and attention to the technology itself can also foster bodily disconnection. What are the differences in technologically-mediated bodily attention and 'organic', 'authentic', or 'internal' bodily attention, and why does this binary persist in seeming relevant? The rise in FemTech (and related phenomena like recent UK and Scottish parliamentary initiatives to address women's health disparities) indicates attention to systemic women's health inequalities -- does attention result from cultural change, and/or drive it? Drawing from ethnographic work on endometriosis, period tracking, and hormonal self-management in the US and UK, this paper sets out theoretical provocations that attempt to articulate embodied attention otherwise than the overdetermined binary between distraction and mindfulness.