Jessica Lee Mathiason

In 2021, startup companies raised $1.9 billion for what entrepreneur Ida Tin calls FemTech, or digital tools designed to promote women’s health including medical wearables, diagnostic kits, and self-tracking apps. Not only is FemTech a booming industry, but it is touted as an innovative, feminist corrective for how biomedical devices have traditionally been designed with a male body in mind. Two such FemTech products are LOONCUP, the world’s first “smart” menstrual cup, and EverlyWell’s line of home-health tests. Rooted in the neoliberal logic of personal responsibility and individual self-mastery, these products purport to empower women by giving them tools to manage their health but, in fact, work by enlisting them to place their bodies under corporate surveillance. By drawing parallels to the 20^th century FemCare industry, I show how today’s FemTech companies entice customers by offering new, technological solutions to female body management that promise greater convenience and entry into elusive, upper-middle class lifestyles. Through their marketing they co-opt feminist slogans to sell women’s health products, replacing intersectional feminist critique with neoliberal commodity feminism. Then, when customers use these products, their subjective evaluation of their health is replaced with numerical data (despite questionable accuracy) which is subsequently entered into for-profit databank. This misuse of medical technology is not, however, inevitable. In the final section, I offer a feminist framework for reimagining the FemTech industry by allowing product development to emerge from the daily needs of women, prioritizing outward-facing technologies that conceive of health as environmental and collective, replacing built-in goals with open-ended modeling, and engaging in feminist data practices which emphasize user privacy and the democratization of knowledge.

Given the sensational appeal of Katherine Davis’ The End of the Road, leading to its unofficial designation in The Exhibitor’s Herald as “the most talked about Picture in America” in 1919, it is surprising the film has not received greater critical attention for its peculiarly feminist eugenic vision. Reading The End of the Road alongside other U.S. government hygiene films and contemporaneous journal articles and medical texts, I reveal a different vision of Progressive Era eugenics than that found in the well-known work of Shelley Stamp, Martin Pernick, and Stacie Colwell. Drawing a distinction between what the progressives themselves termed “positive” and “negative” eugenics, I explore hygiene cinema’s unexpected intersection with first-wave feminism, progressive economics, and welfare reform. In so doing, I reveal a window into a nearly-forgotten feminist counter-culture that briefly attained governmental support due to the overlap in membership between the American Social Hygiene Association and the U.S. War Department. At the center of this vision is The End of the Road’s eugenic heroine, Mary, who is neither a wife nor a mother but a college-educated working woman who promotes the “development of oneself for the service of mankind.”

This essay analyzes the current epidemic of school shootings and anti-black police violence in conjunction with the passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968. These two cultural moments— set fifty years apart— are each rooted in the broader discourse of white masculinity in crisis and the insurgence of American nationalism which have intensified during times of great cultural change. In both periods, the impetus to pass gun control legislation is motivated not by the ongoing protests against gun violence facing black Americans, but by a handful of significant events that targeted predominantly white citizens, symbolized by the assassination of President Kennedy in the 1960s and the students of Stoneman Douglas today.

Connecting the real-life patenting of genes to the fictional patenting of the human genome in the TV series Orphan Black, I demonstrate how the neoliberal shift towards privatization is reframing the question of private property, specifically what Donna Dickenson refers to as “property in the body.” While the modern legal subject had ownership over its body, the meeting of eugenic science and intellectual property law today begs the question: to whom does the body and its self-reproducing parts belong? In a departure from the distinction Melinda Cooper draws between the germ and stem cell line, I contend that the 2013 Myriad Genetics Supreme Court Case has created an ideological loophole towards patenting “life itself” and Orphan Black provides an explanatory tool for how the modern legal system is structured by corporate pressures and a mode of legal interpretation that privileges private property rights. My argument unfolds via an examination of Orphan Black’s Leda (female) and Castor (male) clones’ synthetic DNA on three levels: as the object of an intellectual property patent, a mechanism of surplus life and sterility, and a sexually-transmitted virus or bioweapon. By investigating the differences in how the Ledas and Castors are affected by—and affect others through— their synthetic biology, we gain real-world insight into how cultural understandings of gender and sexuality are shaping the development of new scientific technologies and their adjudication in the courtroom. In its entirety, this essay reveals how the larger projects of neoliberalism, capitalism, and advanced scientific technologies are molding the eugenic project as it reemerges as 21st century genetic engineering.

This essay appears in the book Sisterhood, Science, and Surveillance in Orphan Black: Critical Essays edited by Jane Brennan Croft and Alyson R Buckman.