Hormonal models of gender and embodied knowledge in health self-tracking

• In Event: Sociology of Sex and Gender Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 4. Embodiment, Medicine, and Health

Abstract

Against the backdrop of booming online wellness advice promoting hormonal balance, health self-tracking technologies have created new pathways for knowing with and about the body. The seemingly personalized insights from self-tracking devices like smartwatches and rings materializes a cisgender normativity through metrics that serve as hormonal health proxies. Then, stress levels, recovery scores, body battery, and menstrual cycle indicators become essential to maintain a gendered body project. In this paper, I ask how health self-tracking materializes hormonal models of gender. I draw on 43 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with individuals aged 18 to 55 from the New York Metropolitan Area, focusing on health habits, hormonal health, and health tracking. Participants’ motivations to track their biomarkers extend beyond disease prevention and are part of an expansive notion of health that is markedly gendered, expressing divergent expectations about what constitutes, and what it takes, to be healthy. In the case of cisgender women, trans and nonbinary participants, tracking mainly serves as a tool for patient advocacy, emotional regulation, and even self-discovery. For cisgender men, tracking was not as salient as a habit, but when used, it helped ongoing fitness maintenance and self-optimization with no references to it as a tool for self-discovery. Overall, these accounts serve to explore how self-tracking can offer a seemingly scientific legitimacy to cisnormative models of health through the bioessentialization of hormonal models of gender.

Author

• Genesis Luigi Bravo, Yale University