젠더-미디어 생태학적 접근의 모색: 자기추적 기술 사례를 중심으로

Abstract

This study approaches gender as a relational process continuously formed and transformed within the media environment, while likewise understanding the media environment as a condition constituted through its interaction with gender systems. Based on this inter-constitutive perspective, the study proposes ‘gender–media ecology’ as a theoretical perspective and practical approach to explore how gendered embodiment is mediated, conditioned, and reorganized within technological environments. Unlike previous studies that have regarded media primarily as a site of gendered representation or a tool of patriarchal power—and gender as a represented identity or sociocultural construct—this study considers media as an environment and gender as a dynamic, mediated relation formed within that environment. To ground this theoretical inquiry, the study extends key ideas from media ecology, such as mediation, biases, extension and containment, and develops a gender–media ecological analysis using self-tracking technologies as a case study. These technologies—including wearable devices, apps, algorithms, networks, and big data—form a multi-layered media environment that collects, analyzes, and visualizes bodily data, thereby adjusting and reconfiguring users’ bodily practices and sensory experiences. Rather than viewing such technologies as mere measurement tools, the study examines them as complex mediating environments that shape bodily perception and embodied experience. It focuses in particular on how self-tracking technologies act as environmental conditions that structure gendered bodily experiences. This approach enables an analysis of spatio-temporal, sensory, social, and epistemological biases—understood here as the media-ecological orientations and structuring tendencies that mediate bodily agency within technological environments—as they intertwine with gender systems. It also considers how these technologies are deployed in gendered ways while simultaneously reshaping existing gender dynamics. In such mediating dynamics, media technologies configure bodily experiences in particular ways, and gender systems are reconfigured or reinforced through their embeddedness in technological environments. The study conceptualizes the body not as a fixed or bounded entity but as a ‘relational body’ constituted through its interaction with technological, gendered, and social conditions. Self-tracking technologies create conditions that extend or constrain the body, often internalizing norms of gendered femininity or ideal bodily standards. While such systems promote control and efficiency in bodily management, they may marginalize or exclude non-conforming bodies and experiences, thereby reinforcing gender norms. Yet, bodies that resist technological logic, question the datafication process, or seek alternative modes of mediation, can reveal the repressive mechanisms of containment within these technological forms while opening possibilities for reinterpreting the relations among gender, technology, and the body. Media technology acts as a constitutive and mediating condition through which all forms of gendered embodiment—whether normative, oppositional, or emergent—are shaped, negotiated, or constrained. Gender–media ecology, as a critical approach, interrogates these processes of mediation and explores the relationship between ‘media as environment’ and ‘gender as media.’