A Zine for Feminist Design of Reproductive Technologies

Paper in proceeding, 2024

Reproductive technologies encompass aspects of menstrual health, in/fertility, sexual health, pregnancy, contraception, abortion, or menopause, among many other things, thus entangling aspects of the everyday lives of people of all genders. As reproductive technologies have become-and will continue to be-complicit in enabling or challenging the oppressions enacted on our bodies, it is imperative that we critically reflect on the values and methods used when designing these technologies. Despite a growing body of critical work in HCI, we, a community of feminist scholars working on reproductive technologies, find that there is limited practical guidance on bringing together perspectives such that they can be distributed in easy-to-use, engaging, and collaborative ways. This critical visualization responds to these needs and presents a zine (a collaboratively made booklet) that speculates on reproductive technologies by providing examples from a previous design workshop that happened at NordiCHI 2022 and a guide with activities and reflections on how to organize this kind of workshop. We have also included instructions on how to print and assemble the zine. Some of the examples featured in the zine imagine utopian feminist futures, and some of them intentionally expose or 'trouble' the taken-for-granted dichotomies behind the design and use of reproductive technologies. For instance, several examples draw from the feminist value of embodiment and prioritize the qualitative and felt experiences of menstruating. Other projects highlight the risks of reproductive bodies being commodified and surveilled through technology. The projects are presented through a lens of 'feminist values', which are particularly useful for critically highlighting existing power structures and instead centering subjective experiences that are typically erased in (cis-)normative approaches to reproductive health. We intend the zine to act as a collaborative, accessible, low-tech, and open-ended feminist tool and to use it as a stepping-stone for bringing together an already flourishing community of designers and researchers. Since the zine itself allows for reassembling and reconfiguring, we envision an impromptu zine-assembling activity at the conference presentation, where we invite the audience to add their own feminist values and experiences of designing (and using) reproductive technologies. The zine is free and accessible online, ready to be used in future workshops, offering it as a guide, but also as an easy way to get acquainted with feminist vocabulary in general. We hope this work is one step towards formalizing an (open) community of people working with designing and researching reproductive technologies in the Nordics.