Making a Normal Hyperproductive Ethos: The Gendered Labour of Making and Using Fitbits, Nike Bands, and Jawbone Ups

• In Event: Free and Digital Labor of Women: Technofeminist Examinations of Cyber-Inequality and the Politics of (In)visibility

Abstract

This paper addresses the gendered tensions existing between the distinct, overproductive female consumer market for newly popular activity trackers (Fitbits, Nike Bands, Jawbone Ups, Samsung Gears, and IWatches) and the strained female labourers globally who produce them. Activity trackers pursue a upper middle classed female consumer who has been normalized as a hyperproductive subject, able to maintain constant pace and productivity to achieve success in family, work and social life. In the digital economy, the flexible and enduring female will fend off economic and job insecurity that plagues the middle class and those left out of the digital job market. Activity trackers offer a popular automated solution to fend off underproductivity. Trackers monitor consistent pace through home, corporate life and exercise regime/leisure time; remind us to walk, sleep, hydrate; and report our results to our digital social networks and coworkers. The ads are gendered female and classed, reifying the ideal female as hyperproductive, multi-tasking, competitive and corporately successful; these biometric managers are offered as tools to meet complex demands for female productivity. The advertisements fails to note the insecure, excessive labour required of the (largely female) workers who build these devices in China, Taiwan, Pakistan, Argentina, and thus forfeit caring for their selves and families. Activity trackers invite us to glorify neoliberal ethics lauding increased productivity and endurance as digital economy labourers, while ignoring the essential hyperwork, and resulting economic insecurity, of women workers who make these devices.

Author

• Paula M Gardner, OCAD University