CURRENT RESEARCH PROJECT

What role does technology play in women?

This PhD thesis contributes to a nuanced understanding of how contemporary health discourses on digital technologies shape normative ideals of individual health and female embodiment. I draw on perspectives from the health belief model (HBM) and feminist new materialism to understand the material-discursive practices that form norms and ideals of the female body, and how this influences individual decision-making processes.

This research is primarily guided by its focus on new technologies that extend health discourse, namely healthism and diet and wellness culture, within an established white neoliberal rhetoric. The growing reliance on new technologies, such as visual-based social media platforms, wearables and self-tracking devices, provides the conditions for dominant powers to present and moderate the female body as one that is in constant need of self-improvement.

Qualitative in-depth semi-structured interviews with 70 women in Australia illuminate experiences adhering to sociocultural (re)productions of health and their embodied practices with new technologies. Through a mixed-method approach in examining this data, I argue that new technologies enact and produce normative standards of the female body that are disconnected from the sociocultural and political factors that form everyday life.

The significance of this study lies in the analysis of how women in Australia navigate and mediate various intricate health discourses on new technologies that alter their individual perceptions of the body, self and identity, and thus influence health-related behaviours. The findings from this thesis provide timely guidance on the design of interventions that afford women the knowledge and power to make informed decisions about their own bodies.

If you are interested in participating in the study, please fill out the form accessible via the button below: