Reimagining (Women's) Health: HCI, Gender and Essentialised Embodiment

An ever-increasing body of work within HCI investigates questions of around "Women's Health" with the aim to disrupt the status quo of defaulting to an implicit norm of cis-male bodies. This laudable and feminist project has the potential to drastically improve the inclusivity and availability of health care. To explore how this research attends to gender, embodiment and identity, we conducted a critical discourse analysis of 17 publications explicitly positioning themselves as works concerned with "Women's Health". We find essentialised articulations of embodiment and gender, though little discussion on the intersections of race, class, sexuality and cultural contexts. Through two speculative designs, we illustrate potential responses to our analysis: The Shadow Zine, a reflection of self and the Compass, a token for community care.(1) Our work provides an opportunity to develop a broader frame of gender and health, one that centers (gendered) marginalised health by attending to the power structures of existing medical practices and norms.