‘There’s only so much data you can handle in your life’: accommodating and resisting self-surveillance in women’s running and fitness tracking practices

The widespread use of Fitbits, Garmins and Apple Watches is emblematic of the ‘Quantified Self’ (QS) movement, where participants utilise digital self-tracking devices to generate a broad range of data on their health and fitness for the purposes of self-improvement. Gendered expectations for beauty and health have led to women becoming disproportionately represented amongst fitness tracker wearers, as weight loss and self-discipline for the purposes of beauty are often considered women’s endeavours. To examine the gendered ways in which wearable technologies are utilised in fitness practices, I look to ‘running interviews’ and semi-structured interviews with 10 women who identify as self-tracking runners to better apprehend the ways in which self-surveillance through a fitness tracking device is both accommodated and resisted. Drawing on a Foucauldian conceptual framework of surveillance, discipline and technologies of femininity, I describe four strategies of resistance to datafication: labelling some data as excessive, not tracking every run or every day, invoking one’s humanity and fallibility as a way of limiting disappointment from unfavourable data, and re-valuing feelings over data. While these self-trackers have undergone this process of problematisation and deemed this level of self-surveillance to be an important part of what they see as a healthy lifestyle, they do not fully accept practices of dataism, optimisation and technologies of femininity, entirely.