Trans Embodiment, Fitness Wearables and the Queer Pleasures of Datafication

Abstract

This article examines entanglements between a fitness wearable device, the data it collects and visualizes, and the body-mind they claim to represent. Drawing on embodied insights from my experience as a transmasculine-identified member of a ‘science-backed, technology-tracked’ fitness experience and employing discourse and visual analysis of marketing materials and conversations on a public subreddit for enthusiasts, the article places ‘misfit bodies’ – rather than the unmarked, universal ‘body’ – at the centre of conversations about fitness wearables and self-tracking data. Employing queer/trans critique enables analysis of forms of difference that mediate and compose all bodies and illuminates the regulatory norms and technologies through which they are produced. Throughout, the article foregrounds how selves, bodies, data, and technologies are entangled in mutual and open-ended becomings that exceed the assumed transformation of wearable users into neoliberal healthist subjects.