Symposium: Gender, Health and the Constitution: More than Merely Two-legged Wombs : Lessons on Metaphor and Body Politics from Atwood\u27s \u3ci\u3eThe Handmaiden\u27s Tale\u3c/i\u3e (1985)

This essay explores the dehumanizing potential of metaphors used to describe women’s reproductive biology through literary analysis of Margaret Atwood’s canonical feminist novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). Attending to the rhetoric that both justifies and contests ritualized rape and forced surrogacy in Atwood’s novel, this essay begins by interrogating the ubiquitous cultural and biomedical metaphors that reduce women and pregnant people to their bodies’ reproductive potential. The first section draws from scholarship in medical anthropology, medical rhetoric, and literary studies to illuminate how gendered stereotypes pervade biomedical, cultural, and legal representations of reproduction, reifying the conflation of women and people who can become pregnant with their reproductive biology. The essay’s second section applies an ecofeminist lens to The Handmaid’s Tale to consider the consequences of this metaphorization amid a simultaneously environmental and public health crisis. The novel renders biomedical metaphors of women’s bodies as reproductive machines literal by legally classifying fertile women as “national resources” within a patriarchal capitalist economy, a dehumanizing abstraction that permits the State first to commodify, then to commandeer and equitably distribute fertile women in the name of public health and ecological crisis management. When considered from this angle, The Handmaid’s Tale inspires closer attention to figurative language’s real-world impact on health law and policy, particularly in moments of environmental catastrophe and political unrest

Trust and privacy in the context of user-generated health data

This study identifies and explores evolving concepts of trust and privacy in the context of user-generated health data. We define “user-generated health data” as data captured through devices or software (whether purpose built or commercially available) and used outside of traditional clinical settings for tracking personal health data. The investigators conducted qualitative research through semistructured interviews (n = 32) with researchers, health technology start-up companies, and members of the general public to inquire why and how they interact with and understand the value of user-generated health data. We found significant results concerning new attitudes toward trust, privacy, and sharing of health data outside of clinical settings that conflict with regulations governing health data within clinical settings. Members of the general public expressed little concern about sharing health data with the companies that sold the devices or apps they used, and indicated that they rarely read the “terms and conditions” detailing how their data may be exploited by the company or third-party affiliates before consenting to them. In contrast, interviews with researchers revealed significant resistance among potential research participants to sharing their user-generated health data for purposes of scientific study. The widespread rhetoric of personalization and social sharing in “user-generated culture” appears to facilitate an understanding of user-generated health data that deemphasizes the risk of exploitation in favor of loosely defined benefits to individual and social well-being. We recommend clarification and greater transparency of regulations governing data sharing related to health