TY - JOUR
T1 - The menstruating entrepreneur kickstarting a new politics of women's health
AU - Ng, Sarah
AU - Bardzell, Shaowen
AU - Bardzell, Jeffrey
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under award 1513604 at Indiana University. Authors’ addresses: S. Ng, Donald Bren School of Informatics and Computer Science, University of California-Irvine, Donald Bren Hall, 6210, Irvine, CA 92697; email: ngsm@uci.edu; S. Bardzell and J. Bardzell, The Pennsylvania State University, E397 Westgate Building, University Park, PA 16802; emails: {sbardzell, jsb6077}@psu.edu. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. © 2020 Association for Computing Machinery. 1073-0516/2020/08-ART21 $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3397158
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 ACM.
PY - 2020/9
Y1 - 2020/9
N2 - This article addresses itself to two developments in recent HCI research. One is the rising emphasis on women's health, a topic that is often seen as at least partly political. The other development in HCI research is the ongoing interest in supporting democracy and political activism. We present the case of a menstrual cup design project in Taiwan, called the Formoonsa Cup, whose product development led to the change in the legal status of menstrual cups and forcefully challenged a traditional value of hymen maintenance as an expression of "pure"and morally upright womanhood. We argue that this project is significant to HCI research for the following two reasons: first, because the design project is a successful, if complicated, case of political activism, and second, because the design and legalization processes were in part mediated by platform technologies, including social networking, crowdfunding, and direct democracy platforms. Using philosopher Michel Foucault's notion of "subjugated knowledge,"we analyze the case to improve understandings of how design can engage in emancipatory politics in the domain of women's health in HCI. In this case study, we begin with the idea that women's freedom of self-care is the knowledge that is subjugated, though by the end we suggest that subjugated knowledge is a more complex, and troubling, category than this initial evaluation suggests. We also argue that design can critique and intervene when it materializes previously subjugated knowledges and renders them both socially intelligible and politically efficacious.
AB - This article addresses itself to two developments in recent HCI research. One is the rising emphasis on women's health, a topic that is often seen as at least partly political. The other development in HCI research is the ongoing interest in supporting democracy and political activism. We present the case of a menstrual cup design project in Taiwan, called the Formoonsa Cup, whose product development led to the change in the legal status of menstrual cups and forcefully challenged a traditional value of hymen maintenance as an expression of "pure"and morally upright womanhood. We argue that this project is significant to HCI research for the following two reasons: first, because the design project is a successful, if complicated, case of political activism, and second, because the design and legalization processes were in part mediated by platform technologies, including social networking, crowdfunding, and direct democracy platforms. Using philosopher Michel Foucault's notion of "subjugated knowledge,"we analyze the case to improve understandings of how design can engage in emancipatory politics in the domain of women's health in HCI. In this case study, we begin with the idea that women's freedom of self-care is the knowledge that is subjugated, though by the end we suggest that subjugated knowledge is a more complex, and troubling, category than this initial evaluation suggests. We also argue that design can critique and intervene when it materializes previously subjugated knowledges and renders them both socially intelligible and politically efficacious.
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U2 - 10.1145/3397158
DO - 10.1145/3397158
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85092480526
SN - 1073-0516
VL - 27
JO - ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction
JF - ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction
IS - 4
M1 - 3397158
ER -