A feminist new materialism analysis of pelvic floor digital health messages

ABSTRACT

This interdisciplinary study examines digital communication strategies used by advocacy groups/social media influencers about a stigmatized women’s health issue. Pelvic floor disorders (PFDs) affect one in three women, but many women lack knowledge about and do not discuss PFDs. Women report feelings of isolation, shame, embarrassment, and dirtiness. To combat this, advocacy organizations recently implemented campaigns to educate women of varying ages about PFDs. Theories of shame resilience, digital communication advocacy and health activism, and feminist new materialisms framed this study. This thematic analysis questioned how women’s bodies are represented and transformed in digital environments, and in doing so, messages from three PFD advocacy organizations and PFD influencers on TikTok were examined. Findings illustrate that pelvic messages of shame resilience encourage “talking about it,” embrace stigmatized language, emphasize the need to reform inadequate policies, and incite gendered commitments to shame resilience, and distinguish commonality from abnormality. Additionally, in exploring new understandings of matter and embodiment, findings show that digital health messages encourage women to partake in digital self-administration of care, normalize vaginal rhetoric, and avoid having their social media content shadowbanned.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital messages
• feminist new materialism
• shame resilience theory
• thematic analysis
• women’s health

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Urogynecology is the area of medicine that studies both gynecology and urology and treats problems at the physiological intersection (i.e., women’s pelvic health) (What is a Urogynecologist? 2017).

2. Brown (2006) originally conceptualized SRT. based on data from 215 women. Since that initial study, SRT has been elaborated to include men as study participants as well. As Brown did not originally claim SRT to be a gendered or women’s theory, we did not assume such in our analysis. According to Cortes (2021, 1), shadowbanning is defined as ‘the removal or suppression of content without the platform notifying the user that their content is in violation of any community guidelines or usage rules.’.

3. Since data collection of this study in 2021, Lavender has created an organization called Renalis Health, which provides “digital therapeutics for pelvic health” (“Welcome to Renalis” 2023).

4. According to Cortes (2021, 1), shadowbanning is defined as ‘the removal or suppression of content without the platform notifying the user that their content is in violation of any community guidelines or usage rules.’

5. Using a rudimentary verification, we conducted a quick search of articles with the names of social media platforms in their titles and published in Feminist Media Studies as of May 2023. Our findings demonstrated that TikTok is indeed the least studied platform in this journal: Instagram showed up in 18 article titles, Twitter was featured in 12 titles, Facebook was in 11 titles, and TikTok appeared in two titles.

6. The total number of posts may overlap due to users using multiple hashtags in one post.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the n/a.