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Productivity over Menstrual Justice: Reinforcement of Neoliberal Self Care through the Japanese Government’s Promotion of Femtech
Kitada, Ami
Kitada, Ami
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Abstract
Femtech, or the technologies that help manage women’s reproductive health issues, have rapidly developed in the 2020s. Along with the advantages that these technologies bring, they can serve as temporary solutions for gender inequality in the workplace without offering any long-term resolutions and instead reinforce epistemic injustice. This paper will examine Femtech discourses and promotion strategies in Japan, where Femtech is implemented through various government policies. Femtech promotion in Japan is inseparable from the Basic Policy on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment, introduced by the Japanese government in 2015. In this paper, I will demonstrate how the Japanese government’s Femtech promotion strategies marginalize menstruators in various ways. These strategies have several effects: the reinforcing of male dominance in managerial positions; the limiting/restricting of the Femtech target audience to cisgender, heterosexual office-working women with sufficient financial means to afford the technologies and services; and the reinforcing of epistemic injustice whereby menstruators’ bodies are subjected to numerical measurements for the sake of productivity, among others. Analyzing the case study of Japan’s Femtech discourses and promotion strategies, this paper aims to shed light on issues related to gynocolonialism and neoliberal government policies more broadly.
Description
These are the slides from a presentation given at The Midwest Conference on Asian Affairs (MCAA) on 09/14/2024.
Date
2024-09-14
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Publisher
University of Kansas
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Keywords
Femtech, Japan, Menstruation, Digital health technologies, Self-care