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- Convenors:
-
Jennifer Denbow
(California Polytechnic State University)
Coleen Carrigan (University of Virginia)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract:
This panel combines feminist STS theories of care with theories on reproductive labor. Papers will map connections among technological developments of late capitalism, the degradation and commodification of reproductive labor, and the racialized gender politics of scientific knowledge production.
Long Abstract:
Whether the focus is on the flows of care workers from the global south to the global north or on the dismantling of the welfare state, reproductive labor has increasingly become a site of extraction under neoliberalism. Although reproductive labor underpins the economy, it is often naturalized and made invisible through material, cultural, epistemic and ideological relations of power. These same power relations enthrone digital commodities, aggrandizing tools useful to the intensification of value extraction from labor markets around the globe.
Care is a critical analytical category to uncover the oppressive norms of knowledge production in science and technological worksites. In feminist STS, care is taken up as both a conceptual concern (what do we care about?) and a methodological one (why do we care?) to excavate and investigate hidden labors that are deleted from the individualistic, androcentric myth-building of technoscientific work.
This panel will generate insights from joining feminist STS theories of care together with political economic theories on caring labor. Panelists will explore questions such as: What are the connections between neoliberalism’s fetishization of technology and its novel modes of extraction and degradation of reproductive labor? How are these linked to gendered and racialized constructions of whose work matters and whose knowledge matters in science? How is the virtualization of society connected to the devaluation of reproductive labor? How does the fetishization of technoscience act as an ideological solvent for care about the social?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Sophie Bauer (Goethe University Frankfurt)
Short abstract:
Technologically mediated practices like menstrual cycle tracking have become more and more popular. In my paper, I explore the relationship of care and economization through the example of menstrual cycle tracking.
Long abstract:
Over the past 10 years, menstruation has become a subject of increasing public and political interest. Activists ask to break taboos, so-called alternative period products successfully compete with conventional menstrual hygiene technologies, and the demand for free period products in public buildings has reached the parliaments. Besides, technologically mediated practices like menstrual cycle tracking have become more and more popular. While cycle tracking is framed as a practice to increase body-literacy, well-being and health, it can be analyzed as a technology of anticipation (Adams et al. 2009). In my paper I show that what is anticipated is not only the bleeding or ovulation, but also qualities of re/productivity. Through tracking practices, the menstrual cycle becomes a resource to organize everyday life as well as work along ideas of care and self-care on the one hand and optimization and enhancement on the other. Practices of caring menstrual embodiment therefore blur with those of an entrepreneurial self (Bröckling 2007) using menstrual embodiment as a source of neoliberal extraction.
Feminist conceptions of care are a helpful tool to analyze these ambivalences. Exploring the relationship of care and economization through the example of menstrual cycle tracking, I ask to what extent these practices oscillate between care as self-care and care as (re/productive) labour.
Elizabeth Fetterolf (Stanford University)
Short abstract:
I will present preliminary findings from an ethnography of the "Age Tech" sector in the US. Through interviews, observation, and analysis of company documents, public-facing materials, and publications I investigate competing visions within the sector for the future of care, work, and aging.
Long abstract:
The US, like many nations, is in a “crisis of care;” due to aging cohorts, a frayed social safety net, high costs of in-home care, and an underpaid, undervalued homecare workforce, eldercare is increasingly inaccessible (e.g., Abelson & Rios, 2023; Glenn, 2000). The eldercare technology, or “Age Tech,” industry has introduced myriad new technologies – positioning these developments as urgent solutions to the “care crisis.” Existing scholarship has examined how care workers and families navigate surveillant systems that mediate eldercare in the US (e.g., Glaser, 2021; Berridge et al., 2019) and how technologists in Japan envision caring technologies as vehicles for family and state futures (Robertson, 2017; Wright, 2023), but there has been limited research on how professionals within the American “Age Tech” sector envision “the future of care work.” This study draws on ethnographic fieldwork with doctors, technologists, researchers, and entrepreneurs in the industry and analysis of extant materials to answer the following questions: How do these professionals envision the future of care, work, and aging? When and how do these visions come into conflict with one another? And finally, how do they speak about the gendered, racialized homecare workforce who they seek to augment, replace, and/or aid? In my preliminary findings, I argue that competing visions are often at play, even within the same organizations and within individual narratives – members of the “Age Tech” industry alternate between presenting themselves as savvy entrepreneurs tapping into the “longevity economy” and do-gooders providing a necessary service for a social ill.
Shana Riethof (University of Liège)
Short abstract:
NIPT in Belgium is based on the premise of equity in access to testing. However, gender, race and class inequalities materialize at various stages of the test’s trajectory. Analyzed through the lens of care, these inequalities result from the valuation of some reproductive bodies over others.
Long abstract:
In 2017, Belgium became the first European country to offer first-tier noninvasive prenatal testing (NIPT) to all pregnant women for free. Without much public scrutiny, NIPT replaced long-standing and routinized screening practices for Down syndrome. The goal of the offer is to ‘enhance reproductive autonomy’ by informing women on the fetus’ health. Fetal DNA is accessed through maternal blood and then compared to a ‘normal’ data set of reference (the 'general population') to assess the risk of aneuploidies. The reproductive body thus plays a crucial role in the production of knowledge on the population, as well as its management.
Unlike commercial offers, NIPT in Belgium is based on the premise of equity in access to testing. However, I argue that various inequalities materialize at different stages of the test’s trajectory. Analyzed through the lens of care, these inequalities result from the valuation of some reproductive bodies and the negligence of others.
To illustrate this, I draw on my ethnographic fieldwork in a genetic center. First, I turn to the laboratory to show how some marginalized populations were not included in the establishment of the set of reference. Second, I turn to genetic counselling to show how the test fails to address women’s material conditions of life and the gendered division of reproductive labor. The test perpetuates an individualist discourse on choice that does not always align with practitioners’ notions of a ‘good care’. The implementation of NIPT is underpinned by gender, race and class biases in a neoliberalized healthcare setting.
Nazli Ozkan (Koc University)
Short abstract:
This paper explores how women in Turkey share self-tracking data, such as step counts, on Instagram to quantify and render visible their labor at home. By emphasizing productivity as an important factor ordering life at home, smartwatches reproduce neoliberal mentality in intimate places.
Long abstract:
This paper explores how a group of women in Turkey shares self-tracking data, such as step counts or calorie scores, on Instagram to quantify and render visible their labor and productivity at home. Although neoliberal, digital capitalism makes it harder to distinguish home and workplace, my digital ethnography with woman Instagram users highlights that women working from home feel a home-workplace separation that renders their labor invisible. My participants serve as both primary caregivers in their families and digital laborers, earning income through Instagram accounts with more than 20K followers. For these women, work encompasses both unpaid reproductive labor and paid Instagram work done at home. Women care for their children, cook, and clean without immediate monetary return, while also producing content on Instagram that generates income. They struggle to prove their productivity when completing both tasks because they believe that being registered as productive still requires working at a designated workplace. Sharing photographs on Instagram that display smartwatch numbers, such as reaching 7,000 steps while working at home, aims to publicly showcase typically invisible gendered productivity. By translating embodied labor exploitation into quantified data, smartwatches provide women with a new form of information, enabling them to challenge the newly redrawn home-workplace boundaries under neoliberal digital capitalism. Yet, since this information emphasizes productivity as an important factor ordering life at home, smartwatches reproduce neoliberal mentality by encouraging women to guarantee that their productivity at home matches the market-induced levels of productivity.
Samhita Das (Rice University)
Short abstract:
This paper investigates the implications of two contrasting medical technologies that have set their roots in India- hysterectomy and Uterine Transplantation. While doing so, it seeks to understand the contradicting ways in which the political economy of medicalized care emerges in the two sites.
Long abstract:
This paper is based on a multi-sited ethnographic investigation in the “Wombless Villages” of Beed and selected medical institutions in Mumbai and Delhi, India. The remote ‘Wombless Villages” of Beed, situated in the drought-prone region of Western India, represent a lifeworld contained in moments of loss and repression. In these villages, women from marginalized Dalit and Adivasi communities are coerced to remove their uteruses to retain their employment in the sugarcane factories. Generations of neo-liberal and caste-based exploitation have led to the emergence of what came to be identified as the “wombless villages” of India. On the other end, the metropolitan cities of Mumbai and Delhi, in India, have emerged as a hope for the future of the world. Approximately ten hours of drive from Beed lies the financial capital of India- Mumbai is set to welcome its first uterus transplant program. This advancement has allowed India to emerge as a destination of choice for UTS in the world today. Further, in the escalating demand for UTS, there has been ambiguity within the accounts of doctors regarding the securing of healthy uteruses required for the procedure. This pushes the following concerns to the forefront: What will be the cost of this future UTS promises to the world? Furthermore, who will bear the cost of it? Such questions bring into scrutiny the discourse on the world's reproductive futures- offered by UTS programs in Mumbai and Delhi in contrast to its absolute absence in the remote villages of Beed.