Feminist Sensing

Abstract

The menstruating body has long been a site of stigma, concealment, and patriarchal control. As sensing and self-tracking technologies increasingly mediate how people come to know their menstrual cycles, mainstream approaches perpetuate these values, prioritizing quantified data while overlooking the rich, embodied, and material dimensions of menstrual experience. Rather than entirely rejecting data-driven sensing, this research asks how quantitative and qualitative ways of sensing might come together to design sensing technologies that bring us closer to our bodies rather than further away from them.

Drawing on feminist epistemology, posthuman feminism, and feminist new materialism, and working with Research through Design, DIY practices, and more-than-human perspectives, this research advances “feminist sensing” as a design sensibility for designing with the menstruating body. Feminist sensing is articulated through two interrelated contributions. The first, “making feminist sensing”, proposes a design concept grounded in two sub-concepts: “leakiness”, engaging directly with the body's materials and resisting boundaries or concealment; and “tactfulness”, attending to touch and to who and what is being touched by technology. The second, “practicing feminist sensing”, offers a methodological contribution, reflecting on what it means to conduct feminist design research through situated, embodied, and politically engaged practice. 

These contributions emerge from seven peer-reviewed publications spanning the design of a skin-worn conductivity sensor for touching vaginal fluids, participatory workshops on crafting intimate technologies, ethical tensions in designing for the vagina, and speculative explorations of more-than-human menstrual care involving soil, animals, and the vaginal microbiome. Together, they outline a case for sensing otherwise — with feminist tact, material curiosity, and radical joy and hope.

Link to DiVA