Journal articles on the topic 'Photographyof the nude'

This article examines cross-cultural encounters between Japanese and western (European and American) photographers in the immediate postwar period (1945-1955), asking how these encounters influenced Japanese photographic trends. In addition, this article considers what photographic representations of western cultures reveal about postwar constructions of Japanese cultural identity. Building upon recent research framed by conceptions of photography as sites of cross-cultural encounter (see Melissa Miles & Kate Warren), this article argues that photography magazines provided space for consistent exchange between western and Japanese photographers through multiple platforms: interviews and round table discussions of photographic trends; articles on and photo series by western photographers; and images by both western and Japanese photographers depicting western cultural material and landscapes, such as photographs of western-style fashions, domestic space, and daily life in European and American cities. Such encounters directly influenced photographic trends in Japan. Features on European nude photographers popularised nude photography as an art form among Japanese photographers, and works contributed by the likes of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and Robert Doisneau contributed to a rising interest in photographic humanism. Further, these encounters provided a conduit through which photographers and readers encountered western cultural material at a time when Japan underwent a cultural identity crisis brought on by the devastation of defeat and foreign Occupation. In this way, photography magazines simultaneously functioned as spaces that negotiated what exactly “Japanese culture” meant in Japan’s new postwar world.

This article considers Jean-Luc Nancy’s reflections on the nude in painting and photography in the light of his aesthetics, his philosophy of the body and soul, and some of his other writings on portraiture. It explores Nancy’s insistence on skin as the truth behind and beyond which no further meaning waits to be revealed: there are no hidden depths, no secret or sacred truths, nothing is concealed beneath the skin.

This essay examines the interface between the indexical and the gestural, through the practice of early twentieth-century painters active in the Bombay Presidency and adjoining princely states such as Kolhapur and Aundh. It draws upon archival materials such as biographies, memoirs, and photographs documenting artists at work in the studio, as well as remains of posed photographs that were produced as aide-mémoire for paintings. It throws light on the fraught place of photography as aesthetic practice in the art academy, its association with colonial protocols of scientific accuracy, capture and control, and its use to construct suggestive representational hybrids of the anatomical and the painterly outside the academy. The article explores patterns of patronage and of the use of photography in the practices of art production, publication, and exhibition, looking, in particular, at the role of the photographic basis of the portrait painting, and how photography became a supplement to “life-study” or the practice of drawing from nude models. The gendered politics of this interface, between artist, technology, and female model is a recurrent thread of analysis, drawing on critical debates that were published in Marathi periodicals of the time. The article explores the braiding of technologies in artistic practice in different sites, from the academy and the artist’s studio through to publication and exhibition in galleries, and illustrated magazines. While the essay considers a number of artists, including Ravi Varma, Durandhar, and Thakur Singh, it focuses, in particular, on Baburao Painter for his engagement with photography and painting in a career which traversed theater, painting, photography, and film production.

Despite the wealth of data produced by previous and current Earth Observation platforms feeding climate models, weather forecasts, disaster monitoring services and countless other applications, the public still lacks the ability to access a live, true colour, global view of our planet, and nudge them towards a realisation of its fragility. The ideas behind commercialization of Earth photography from space has long been dominated by the analytical value of the imagery. What specific knowledge and actionable intelligence can be garnered from these evermore frequent revisits of the planet’s surface? How can I find a market for this analysis? However, what is rarely considered is what is the educational value of the imagery? As students and children become more aware of our several decades of advance in viewing our current planetary state, we should find mechanisms which serve their curiosity, helping to satisfy our children’s simple quest to explore and learn more about what they are seeing. The following study describes the reasons why current GEO and LEO observation platforms are inadequate to provide truly global RGB coverage on an update time-scale of 5-min and proposes an alternative, low-cost, GEO + Molniya 3U CubeSat constellation to perform such an application.

Young America: The Daguerreotypes of Southworth & Hawes (2005) is a monumental exhibition catalogue showcasing the work of Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes. Together the partners established a renowned daguerreotype studio in mid-nineteenth-century Boston that catered to the city’s bourgeoisie. This paper seeks to unravel the mystery of dozens of daguerreotypes found in Young America, in which elite Boston women appear to be nearly nude. The unidentified women stand in stark contrast to the carefully concealed bodies of Southworth & Hawes’ other female subjects. Why would they expose themselves in such a manner before the camera’s lens? This paper attributes the women’s state of (un)dress to their deliberate emulation of two sculptures in the classical tradition: Clytie, a marble bust dating to antiquity, and Proserpine, a mid-nineteenth-century marble bust by American neoclassical sculptor Hiram Powers. This argument first reveals how a general “classical statue” aesthetic prevailed for women’s deportment in antebellum America, then demonstrates that the busts of Clytie and Proserpine had special significance as icons of white, elite female beauty in the period. Next, this paper makes the case that Southworth & Hawes devised a special style of photography deriving from their own daguerreotypes of the two statues, in which the women’s off-shoulder drapery was deliberately obscured allowing their female clientele to pose in the guise of these famous statues. The paper concludes by arguing that the women shown in these images could pose in this style without contravening societal norms, as these mythological figures were construed by women and men in the period to reflect the central precepts of the mid-nineteenth-century “Cult of True Womanhood.” Moreover, the busts offered sartorial models that reinforced standards of female dress as they related to class and privilege. By baring their flawless, white skin, however, the women positioned themselves at the crux of contentious beliefs about race in a deeply divided nation prior to the American Civil War.

Abstract Net zoals een kunstenaar als Michelangelo Buonarroti (1476-1564) zich profileerde als beeldhouwer, schilder, architect en poëet, laveert Matthew Barney (1967) moeiteloos tussen verschillende hedendaagse kunstvormen.Het oeuvre van de Amerikaanse kunstenaar Matthew Barney bestaat uit performance, fotografie, tekeningen, designobjecten en film. Niet toevallig werd hij in 1989 door een kunstcriticus omgedoopt tot “De Michelangelo van de genitale kunst”. Dit had niet alleen te maken met de vele naakte atletische lichamen in zijn oeuvre. De verwantschap tussen Barney (1967) en Michelangelo (1476-1564) is groter dan men zou verwachten. Senne Schrayen trekt in dit artikel een parallel tussen de lopende performancereeks Drawing Restraint (gestart in 1987) van Barney en de presentatietekeningen van Michelangelo uit 1532 vanuit een transhistorische invalshoek en met aandacht voor het maakproces van de tekeningen. Just as Michelangelo Buonarroti (1476-1564) worked as a sculptor, painter, architect and poet, Matthew Barney (1967) switches smoothly between various contemporary art forms. The oeuvre of this US artist includes performance, photography, drawing, design and film. Not coincidentally an art critic, writing in 1989, dubbed him 'The Michelangelo of genital art' and this was not just because of the many athletic nudes that people his oeuvre. The parallels between Barney (1967) and Michelangelo (1476-1564) are greater than one might think. In the article Senne Schrayen makes a comparison between Barney's current series of performances (started in 1987) called Drawing Restraint and Michelangelo's drawings of 1532 from a transhistorical perspective and giving close attention to the process of making the drawing.

AbstractObjectiveTo assess whether a Smarter Lunchroom intervention based on behavioural economics and adapted for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities would increase the selection and consumption of fruits, vegetables and whole grains, and reduce the selection and consumption of refined grains.DesignThe 3-month intervention took place at a residential school between March and June 2012. The evaluation employed a quasi-experimental, pre–post design comparing five matched days of dietary data. Selection and plate waste of foods at lunch were assessed using digital photography. Consumption was estimated from plate waste.SettingMassachusetts, USA.SubjectsStudents (n 43) aged 11–22 years with intellectual and developmental disabilities attending a residential school.ResultsDaily selection of whole grains increased by a mean of 0·44 servings (baseline 1·62 servings, P = 0·005) and refined grains decreased by a mean of 0·33 servings (baseline 0·82 servings, P = 0·005). The daily consumption of fruits increased by a mean of 0·18 servings (baseline 0·39 servings, P = 0·008), whole grains increased by 0·38 servings (baseline 1·44 servings, P = 0·008) and refined grains decreased by a mean of 0·31 servings (baseline 0·68 servings, P = 0·004). Total kilojoules and total gram weight of food selected and consumed were unchanged. Fruit (P = 0·04) and vegetable (P = 0·03) plate waste decreased.ConclusionsA Smarter Lunchroom intervention significantly increased whole grain selection and consumption, reduced refined grain selection and consumption, increased fruit consumption, and reduced fruit and vegetable plate waste. Nudge approaches may be effective for improving the food selection and consumption habits of adolescents and young adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Background:Pain, fatigue, physical disability, reduced well-being and sleep problems are common consequences of Rheumatic and Musculoskeletal Diseases (RMDs). Paradoxically, these consequences may all lead to a reduction of physical activity, while physical activity actually is an antidote against these consequences. This is acknowledged by experts that included physical activity and exercise into recommendations for management of RMDs [1-3]. Indeed, after programs aimed at a gradual build-up of exercise, many people with a RMD showed an increase of physical activity. However, it is hard to maintain a higher level of physical activity for years as part of daily routine [4-5].Objectives:To identify and present tips, applications and illustrations that support people with an RMD to maintain their level of physical activity for a longer time.Methods:Theoretical considerations and empirical findings guided the identification of tips. Care was taken that the tips and illustrations were translated into layman language and fitted in daily life of common people.Results:Ten tips were found:1) break the habit,2) make sure you can do the exercise activity,3) use aids if needed,4) believe in a good outcome,5) choose a physical activity that fulfils personal goals,6) find a physical activity that you enjoy,7) stop moving while it’s still fun,8) find a buddy,9) make an action plan, and10) find a nudge.A “nudge” is a little push in the right direction that makes a person unconsciously perform physical activities. Examples are an outdoor photography hobby, a dog that comes to you with a dog leash in his mouth, or grandchildren that persuade you to go with them to the playground nearby. If a person with a RMD manages to find a nudge that stimulates instinctive moving without feeling the effort, then physical activity may be maintained. People differ a lot and must discover for themselves which tips help them to maintain physical activity. They must be aware that it may take up to two months for changed habits to stick.Conclusion:The presented tips will help to maintain your level of physical activity. Nevertheless, be aware that effort and perseverance are needed to keep on moving. A challenge for the future is to get more knowledge of natural and pleasurable physical activities. Peers with successful experiences and behavior change experts can help. For the time being, a main advice to maintain a higher level of physical activity with less effort is to find your own nudges.References:[1]Geenen R, Overman CL, Christensen R, et al. EULAR recommendations for the health professional’s approach to pain management in inflammatory arthritis and osteoarthritis. Ann Rheum Dis 2018;77(6):797–807.[2]Macfarlane GJ, Kronisch C, Dean LE, et al. EULAR revised recommendations for the management of fibromyalgia. Ann Rheum Dis 2017;76(2):318–328.[3]Rausch Osthoff AK, Niedermann K, Braun J, et al. 2018 EULAR recommendations for physical activity in people with inflammatory arthritis and osteoarthritis. Ann Rheum Dis 2018;77(9):1251–1260.[4]Knittle K, Nurmi J, Crutzen R, Hankonen N, Beattie M, Dombrowski SU. How can interventions increase motivation for physical activity? A systematic review and meta-analysis. Health Psychol Rev 2018;12(3):211–230.[5]Demmelmaier I, Bergman P, Nordgren B, Jensen I, Opava CH. Current and maintained health-enhancing physical activity in rheumatoid arthritis: a cross-sectional study. Arthritis Care Res (Hoboken). 2013;65(7):1166–1176.Disclosure of Interests:Rinie Geenen Speakers bureau: Sanofi Genzyme paid for a lecture on depression in RA.

Through an unpublished experiment on eye-tracking, we highlight the syncretic multimodality reading as the object of study, specifically the polysemy as a semantic phenomenon of visual perception as a general objective. In a situation of reading digital photography from Brazilian magazine magazines (G Magazine), eye movements were constructed reading paths, with effects of (dis)order of the image and senses of the look (reading gestures). These pathways are results (gaze plot, heat map and pairwise comparisons) of Brazilian university readers. The rationale for choosing specific group data (heterosexual men) is based on the average yes response to the question Is there nudity in the image? (found on the last slide of the experiment). The no responses were from the other five participating groups (homosexual men, bisexual men, homosexual women, bisexual women, heterosexual women). The justification is also given by the heat map and ‘p’ value of this group heterosexual men indicate pairwise comparisons, in relation to the areas of interest: right model underwear, drag queen’s face-wig-bust, Dicesar’s face, drag sandal queen, right model face. The proposal of analysis shares theoretical knowledge by adopting for analysis the dimensions of the various facets of the construct (construction of meaning, Ferrari, 2016, Ferrari et al., 2017) and the semantic-discursive relationship (Pêcheux, 1982, 1983, 2000, 2001, 2011, 2013, 2018) in visual perception of reading digital photograph of advertising cover, in May 2010 issue, of an erotic magazine. The article invests on the metaphorical extensions resulting and dependent on the construction of movement caused, whose construction depends on the existence of polychromy in digital photography, which allows the drive to correspond in the consequent ocular movement, occurrence by the desire of the change of visual direction. This plot has its correspondence in the interpretation that ensures the elaboration of the answer yes or no before the question proposed in the imagery reading experiment.---------------------------------------------------------------------------SINTAXE IMAGÉTICA, POLICROMIA E EXTENSÃO METAFÓRICA EM UMA FOTOGRAFIA NA REVISTA G MAGAZINE: UM ESTUDO EXPERIMENTAL DE LEITURA USANDO RASTREAMENTO OCULARPor meio de um experimento inédito sobre leitura de imagem por rastreamento ocular (eye-tracking), destacamos a leitura de multimodalidade sincrética como objeto de estudo, especificamente a polissemia como fenômeno semântico de percepção visual como objetivo geral. Em situação de leitura de fotografia digital de revista publicitária brasileira (G Magazine), movimentos oculares realizados construíram percursos de leitura, com efeitos de (des)ordem da imagem e sentidos do olhar (gestos de leitura). Esses percursos são resultados (gaze plot, heat map e pairwise comparisons) de leitores universitários brasileiros. A justificativa de escolha de tais dados de grupo específico (homens heterossexuais) se baseia pela média de resposta sim, em relação à pergunta Há nudez na imagem? (que se encontrava no último slide do experimento), se apresentar diferente da média das respostas não dos demais cinco grupos participantes (homens homossexuais, homens bissexuais, mulheres homossexuais, mulheres bissexuais, mulheres heterossexuais) e pelo heat map e valor de p desse grupo homens heterossexuais indicar pairwise comparisons, em relação às áreas de interesse: cueca do modelo direito, rosto-peruca-busto da drag queen, rosto do Dicesar, sandália da drag queen, rosto do modelo direito. A proposta de análise compartilha conhecimentos teóricos ao adotar para análise as dimensões das várias facetas do construal (construção do significado, Ferrari, 2016; Ferrari et al., 2017) e a relação semântico-discursiva (Pêcheux, 1982, 1983, 1984; Souza, 2000, 2001, 2011, 2013, 2018) em percepção visual de leitura de fotografia digital de capa publicitária, em edição de maio de 2010, de uma revista de erotismo. O artigo investe sobre as extensões metafóricas resultantes e dependentes da construção de movimento causado, cuja construção depende da existência da policromia na fotografia digital, que permite a pulsão corresponder no consequente movimento ocular, impulsionado pelo desejo da mudança de direção visual. Essa trama tem sua correspondência na interpretação que assegura a elaboração da resposta sim ou não diante da questão proposta no experimento de leitura imagética.---Original em inglês.

This study aims to determine the description of exhibitionist behavior in women in the nude photography community and find out whether or not a diagnosis of disorderist disorder can be established. This research uses a qualitative approach. This research is prioritized by analyzing secondary data about the opinion of photographers about nude photography that will illustrate the boundaries that show nude photography, including art, and does not lead to pornography, not too vurgar, does not show genital equipment frontally, does not show pubic hair, vague in exploring curves and showing admiration for the beauty shown in the artwork. The results of this study are the subjects of the nude photography model showing the tendency of exhibitionistic behavior and having a high loneliness feeling accompanied by a high sexual drive so that when he feels stressed he will choose to do stress coping by doing nude photos. Keywords: Nude photography, Exhibisionist Disorder. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk untuk mengetahui gambaran perilaku eksibisionis pada perempuan di komunitas nude photography dan mengetahui dapat atau tidaknya menegakkan diagnosa eksibisionis disorder. Penelitian ini menggunakan pendekatan kualitatif. Penelitian ini didahulukan dengan menganalisa data sekunder tentang pendapat fotografer tentang nude photography yang akan menggambarkan batasan yang menunjukkan nude photography termasuk dalam karya seni dan tidak mengarah kepada pornografi, tidak terlalu vurgar, tidak menunjukkan alat genital secara frontal, tidak memperlihatkan pubic hair, samar-samar dalam mengeksplorasi lekuk tubuh dan menunjukkan kekaguman karena keindahan yang ditunjukkan pada karya seni tersebut. Hasil penelitian ini adalah subyek model nude photography menunjukkan kecenderungan perilaku ekshibisionisme dan memiliki perasaan kesepian yang tinggi disertai dengan dorongan seksual yang juga tinggi sehingga saat ia merasakan stres maka akan memilih melakukan coping stress dengan melakukan foto telanjang. Kata Kunci: Nude photography, Exhibisionist Disorder.

Memiliki tubuh yang ideal, tentu saja menjadi hal yang diinginkan oleh banyak individu terutama perempuan. Namun, keinginan untuk memiliki tubuh yang ideal dan indah dilanjutkan dengan keinginan untuk memperlihatkan keseluruhan tubuh atau sebagian tubuh yang umumnya disembunyikan, yang sering dikenal dengan nude photography, menjadi fenomena yang menarik dikaji dalam persperktif abnormalitas. Penelitian dengan pendekatan kualitatif ini bertujuan untuk untuk mengetahui gambaran perilaku eksibisionis pada perempuandi komunitas nude photography dan mengetahui dapat atau tidaknya menegakkan diagnosa Eksibisionis disorder pada mereka. Penelitian ini didahulukan dengan menganalisa data sekunder tentang pendapat fotografer tentang nude photography yang akan menggambarkan batasan yang menunjukkan nude photography termasuk dalam karya seni dan tidak mengarah kepada pornografi, tidak terlalu vurgar, tidak menunjukkan alat genital secara frontal, tidak memperlihatkan pubic hair, samar-samar dalam mengeksplorasi lekuk tubuh dan menunjukkan kekaguman karena keindahan yang ditunjukkan pada karya seni tersebut. Subyek model nude photography menunjukkan kecenderungan perilaku ekshibisionisme dan memiliki perasaan kesepian yang tinggi disertai dengan dorongan seksual yang juga tinggi sehingga saat ia merasakan stres maka akan memilih melakukan coping stress dengan melakukan foto telanjang. Kata Kunci : Nude photography, Fotografer, Exhibisionist Disorder

DAFTAR ISI 1. Relaksasi Dzikir untuk Menurunkan Derajat Kecemasan Pada Ibu Hamil Trimester III Nita Rohayati.....................………………………………………………………. 1 - 11 2. Penerapan Terapi Kognitif untuk Mengatasi Gangguan Stres Pasca Traumatik pada Pekerja Seks Komersial di Panti Sosial Bina Karya Wanita Harapan Mulya Kedoya Laila Uthomah..........................………………………………………………. 12 - 27 3. Korelasi Antara Komunikasi Interpersonal dan Kecerdasan Emosi dengan Motivasi Berprestasi pada SiswaKomunitas Home Schooling Berkemas Wina Lova Riza .................………………………….………………………….. 28 - 43 4. Gambaran Perilaku Eksibisionis pada Perempuan dalam Komunitas Nude Photography di Jakarta Fahrul Rozi, Nuram Mubina …………………………………………………..44 - 61 5. Abstrak Dinamika Psikologis Korban Kekerasan Seksual pada Anak Laki-Laki (Studi Kasus di Karawang) Cempaka Putrie Dimala ........................................................................................62 - 77

The bodies of disordered women … offer themselves as an aggressively graphic text for the interpreter—a text that insists, actually demands, that it be read as a cultural statement, a statement about gender. (Bordo, 94)Violence is transgressive in fundamental ways. It erases boundaries, and imposes agency over others, or groups of others. The assumed social stance is to disapprove, morally and ethically, as a ‘good’ and ‘moral’ female subject. My current research has made me question the simplicity of this approach, to interrogate how aggression socialises power and how resistance to structural violence might look. I analyse three cultural practices to consider the social demarcations around aggression and gender, both within overt acts of violence and in less overt protocols. This research will focus on artistic practices as they offer unique embodied ways to “challenge our systems of representation and knowledge” (Szylak 2).The three creative works reviewed: the 2009 Swedish film the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the work Becoming an Image by Canadian non-binary/transgender artist Cassils, and Gambit Lines, by artist Carolyn Craig, each contest gendered modes of normativity within the space of the Cultural Screen (Silverman). The character of Lisbeth Salander in Girl with the Dragon Tattoo subverts the aggressor female/femme fatale trope in Western cinema by confusing and expanding visual repertoires around aggression, while artists Cassils and Carolyn Craig re-draw how their biologically assigned female bodies perform power in the Cultural Screen by activating bodily feedback loops for the viewer’s gaze.The Aggressor ModeThe discussion of these three works will centre on the ‘female aggressor trope’, understood here as the static coda of visual practices of female power/aggression in the western gaze. This article considers how subverting such representations of aggression can trigger an “epistemic crisis that allows gender categories to change,” in particular in the way protocols of power are performed over female and trans subjectivities (Butler, Athletic 105). The tran/non-binary subject state in the work of Cassils is included in this discussion of the female aggressor trope as their work directly subverts the biological habitus of the female body, that is, the artist’s birth/biologically assigned gender (Bourdieu). The transgender state they perform – where the body is still visibly female but refusing its constraints - offers a radical framework to consider new aggressive stances for non-biologically male bodies.The Cultural Screen and Visual RepresentationsI consider that aggression, when performed through the mediated position of a creative visual practice (as a fictional site of becoming) can deconstruct the textual citations that form normative tropes in the Cultural Screen. The Screen, for this article, is considered asthe site at which the gaze is defined for a particular society, and is consequently responsible both for the way in which the inhabitants of that society experience the gaze’s effects, and for much of the seeming particularity of that society’s visual regime. (Silverman 135)The Screen functions as a suite of agreed metaphors that constitute a plane of ‘reality’ that defines how we perform the self (Goffman). It comprises bodily performance, our internal gaze (of self and other) and the visual artefacts a culture produces. Each of the three works discussed here purposely intervenes with this site of gender production within the Cultural Screen, by creating new visual artefacts that expand permissible aggressive repertoires for female assigned bodies. Deconstructing the Cultural ScreenThe history of images … can be read as a cultural history of the human body. (Belting 17)Cinematic representations play a key role in producing the visual primers that generate social ‘acts’. For this reason I examine the Swedish film Män Som Hatar Kvinnor (Men Who Hate Women, 2009), released as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo for foreign audiences, as an example of an expanding range of female aggressor representations in film, and one of particular complexity in the way it expands on representational politics. I consider how specific scripting, dialogue and casting decisions in the lead female character of Lisbeth Salander (played by Noomi Rapace) serve to deconstruct the female aggressor trope (as criminal or sexual provocateur) to allow her character to engage in aggressive acts outside of the cliché of the deviant woman. This disrupts the fixity of assigned body protocols on the social grid to expand their gendered habitus (Bourdieu).Key semiotic relations in the film’s characterisation of Lisbeth prevent her performance of aggression from moving into the clichés of erotic or evil feminine typologies. Her character remains unfixed, moving between a continuous state of unfolding in response to necessity and desire. Here, she exhibits an agency usually denoting masculinity. This allows her violence a positive emancipatory affect, one that avoids the fixity of the representational tropes of the deviant woman or the femme fatale. Her character draws upon both tropes, but reformulates them into a postmodern hybridity, where aggression slips from its sexualised/deviant fetish state into an athletic political resistance. Signification is strategically confused as Lisbeth struts through the scaffolding of normalcy in her insurgent gender game. Her post-punk weaponised attire draws on the repertoire of super heroes, rock stars and bondage mistresses, without committing to any. The libidinal component of violence/aggression is not avoided, but acknowledged, both in its patriarchal formula and Lisbeth’s enactment of revenge as embodied pleasure.The visual representation of both lead actors is also of interest. Both Lisbeth and Mikael have visible acne scars. This small breach in aesthetic selection affects how we view and consume them as subjects and objects on the Screen. The standard social more for the appearance of male and female leads is to use faces modeled on ideas of symmetry and perfection. These tendencies draw upon the cultural legacies of physiognomy that linked moral character with attractiveness schedules and that continue to flourish in the Cultural Screen (Lavater; Principe and Langlois). This decision to feature faces with minor flaws appropriates the camera’s gaze to re-consider schedules of normalcy, in particular value and image index as they relate to gendered representations. This aesthetic erasure of the Western tradition of stereotyped representations permits transitional spaces to emerge within the binary onslaught. Technology is also appropriated in the film as a space for a performative ‘switching’ of the gender codes of fixity. In her role as undercover researcher, Lisbeth’s control of code gives her both a monetised agency and an informational agency. The way that she types takes on an almost aggressive assertion. Each stroke is active and purposeful, as she exerts control through her interface with digital space. This is made explicit early in the film when she appropriates the gaze of technology (a particularly male semiotic code) to extract agency from within the structural discourse of patriarchy itself. In this scene, she forces her guardian to watch footage of his own act of raping her. Here Lisbeth uses the apparatus of the gaze to re-inscribe it back over his body. This structural inversion of the devices of control is made even more explicit when Lisbeth then brands him with text. Here ‘writing on the body’ becomes manifest.The director also frames initial scenes of Lisbeth’s nude body in subtle ways that fracture the entrenched history of representations of women, where the female as object exists for the gaze of male desire (Berger). Initially all we see are her shoulders. They are powerful and she moves like a boxer, inhabiting space and flexing her sinew. When we do see her breasts, they are neutered from the dominant coda of the “breasted experience” (Young). Instead, they function as a necessary appendage that she acknowledges as part of the technology of her body, not as objectified male desire.These varied representational modes built within Lisbeth’s characterisation, inhabit and subvert the female aggressor trope (as deviant), to offer a more nuanced portrayal where the feminine is still worn, but as both a masquerade and an internal emancipatory dialogue. That is, the feminine is permitted to remain whilst the masculine (as aggressive code) is intertwined into non-binary relations of embodied agency. This fluidity refracts the male gaze from imposing spectatorial control via the gaze.Cassils The Canadian non-binary/transgender artist Cassils also uses the body as semiotic technology to deny submission to the dominant code of the Cultural Screen. They re-image the self with bodybuilding, diet and steroids to exit their biologically female structural discourse into a more fluid gendered state. This state remains transitive as their body is not surgically ‘reassigned ‘ back into normative codes (male or female assignations) but instead inhabits the trans pronoun of ‘they/their’. This challenges the Cultural Screen’s dependence on fixed binary states through which to allocate privilege. This visible reshaping also permits entry into more aggressive bodily protocols via the gaze (through the spectorial viewpoint of self and other).Cassils ruptures the restrictive habitus of female/trans subjectivity to enable more expansive gestures in the social sphere, and a more assertive bodily performance. This is achieved by appropriating the citational apparatus of male aggression via a visual reframing of its actions. Through daily repetitive athletic training Cassils activates the proprioceptive loops that inform their gendered schema and the presentation of self (Goffman). This training re-scripts their socially inscribed gender code with semiotically switched gender ‘acts’. This altered subjectivity is made visible for the viewer through performance to destablise the Screen of representation further via the observers’ gaze.In their work Becoming an Image (2012- current), Cassils performs against a nine hundred kilogram lump of clay for twenty minutes in complete darkness, fractured only by an intermittent camera flash that documents the action. This performance contests the social processes that formulate the subject as ‘image’. By using bodily force (aggressive power) against an inert lump of clay, Cassils enacts the frustration and affect that the disenfranchised Other feels from their own gender shaping (Bhaba). The images taken by the camera during this performance reflect a ferocious refusal, an animal intent, a state of battle. The marks and residues of their bodily ‘acts’ shape the clay in an endurance archive of resistance, where the body’s trace/print forms the material itself along with the semiotic residue of the violence against transgender and female bodies. In some ways, the body of Cassils and the body of clay confront each other through Cassils’s aggressive remolding of the material of social discourse itself.The complicity of photography in sustaining representational discourse is highlighted within Cassils’s work through the intertextual rupturing of the performance with the camera flash and through the title of the work. To Become an Image invokes the processes of the darkroom itself, where the photographer controls image development, whilst the aggressive flash reflects the snapshot of violence, where the gendered subject is ‘imaged’ (formulated and confined) without permission by the observer schedules of patriarchy. The flash also leaves a residual trace in the retinas of the viewer, a kind of image burn, perhaps chosen to mimic the fear, intrusion and coercion that normalcy’s violence impinges over Othered subjects. The artist converts these flash generated images into wallpaper that is installed into the gallery space, usually the day after the performance. Thus, Cassils’s corporeal space is re-inscribed onto the walls of the institutional archive of representations – to evoke both the domestic (wallpaper as home décor), the public domain (the white walls of institutional rhetoric) and the Cultural Screen.Carolyn Craig The work of Carolyn Craig also targets representations that substantiate the Cultural Screen. She uses performative modes in the studio to unravel her own subjective habitus, in particular targeting the codes that align female aggression with deviancy. Her work isolates the action of making a fist to re-inscribe how the aggression code is ‘read’ as embodied knowledge by women. Two key articles by Thomas Schubert that investigated how making a fist is perceived differently between genders (in terms of interiorised power) informed her research. Both studies found that when males make a fist they experience an enhanced sense of power, while women did not. In fact, in the studies, they experienced a slight decrease in their sense of comfort in the world (their embodied sense of agency). Schubert surmised this reflected gender-based protocols in relation to the permissible display of aggression, as “men are culturally less discouraged to use bodily force, which will frequently be associated with success and power gain [whilst women] are culturally discouraged from using bodily force” (Schubert 758). These studies suggest how anchored gestures of aggression are to male power schemas and their almost inaccessibility to women. When artists re-formulate such (existing) input algorithms by inserting new representations of female aggression into the Cultural Screen, they sever the display of aggression from the exclusive domain of the masculine. This circulates and incorporates a broader visual code that informs conceptual relations of power.Craig performs the fisting action in the studio to neuter this existing code using endurance, repetition and parody (fig. 1). Parody activates a Bakhtian space of Carnivalesque, a unique space in the western cultural tradition that permits transgressive inversions of gender, power and normativity (Hutcheon). By making and remaking a fist through an absurdist lens, the social scaffolding attached to the action (fear, anxiety, transgression) is diluted. Repetition and humour breaks down the existing code, and integrates new perceptual schema through the body itself. Parody becomes a space of slippage, one that is a precursor to a process of (re)constitution within the social screen, so that Craig can “produce representation” rather than be (re)presentation (Schneider 51). This transitory state of Carnivalesque produces new relational fields (both bodily and visual) that are then projected back into the Screen of normativity to further dislodge gender fixity. Figure 1: Carolyn Craig, Gambit Lines (Angles of Incidence #1), 2016. Etchings from performance on folded aluminium, 25.5 x 34 x 21cm. This nullifies the power of the static image of deviancy (the woman as specimen) and ferments leakages into broader representational fields. Craig’s fisting actions target the proprioceptive feedback loops that make women fear their own bodies’ potential of violence, that make us retreat from the citational acts of aggression. Her work tilts embodied retreat (as fear) through the distorted mimesis of parody to initiate a Deleuzian space of agentic potential (Deleuze and Guattari). This is re-inserted into the Cultural Screen as suites of etchings grounded in the representational politics, and historical genealogy of printed matter, to bring the historical conditions of formation of knowledge into review.Conclusion The aggressor trope as used within the works discussed, produces a more varied representational subject. This fosters subjectivities outside the restraints of normativity and its imposed gendered habitus. The performance of aggression by bodies not permissibly branded to script such acts forces static representations embedded through the Cultural Screen into “an unstable and troubled terrain, a crisis of knowledge, a situation of not-knowing”. This state of representational confusion leads to a “risking of gender itself … that exposes our knowledge about gender as tenuous, contested, and ungrounded in a thorough and productively disturbing sense” (Butler, Athletic 110). Tropes that define binary privilege, when dislodged in such a way, become accessible to fluidity or erasure. This allows more nuanced gender allocation to schedules of power.The Cultural Screen produces and projects the metaphors we live by and its relations to power are concrete (Johnson and Lakoff). Even small-scale incursions into masculine domains of agency (such as the visual display of aggression) have a direct correlation to the allocation of resources, both spatial, economic and subjective. The use of the visual can re-train the conceptual parameters of the cultural matrix to chip small ways forward to occupy space with our bodies and intellects, to assume more aggressive stances in public, to speak over people if I feel the need, and to be rewarded for such actions in a social context. I still feel unable to propose direct violence as a useful action but I do admit to having a small poster of Phoolan Devi in my home and my admiration for such women is deep.ReferencesBelting, Hans. An Anthropology of Images. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2011.Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin, 2008.Bhaba, Homi. "The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism.” Out There: Marginalisation and Contemporary Cultures. Eds. Russell Ferguson and Trinh T. Minh-ha. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1990. 71-89.Bordo, Susan. “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity.” Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. Eds. Katie Conboy et al. New York: Colombia UP, 1997. 90-110.Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.Butler, Judith. “Athletic Genders: Hyperbolic Instance and/or the Overcoming of Sexual Binarism.” Stanford Humanities Review 6 (1998): 103-111.———. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal (1988): 519–31.Cassils. Becoming an Image. ONE Archive, Los Angeles. Original performance. 2012.Craig, Carolyn. “Gambit Lines." The Deviant Woman. POP Gallery, Brisbane. 2016.Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1987.Girl with the Dragon Tattoo [Män Som Hatar Kvinnor]. Dir. Niels Arden Oplev. Stockholm: Yellowbird, 2009.Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Allen Lane, 1969.Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. New York: Methuen, 1985.Johnson, Mark, and George Lakoff. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980.Lavater, John Caspar. Essays in Physiognomy Designed to Promote the Knowledge and Love of Mankind. Vol. 1. London: Murray and Highley, 1789.Principe, Connor, and Judith Langlois. "Shifting the Prototype: Experience with Faces Influences Affective and Attractiveness Preferences." Social Cognition 30.1 (2012): 109-120.Schneider, Rebecca. The Explicit Body in Performance. New York: Routledge, 1997.Schubert, Thomas W., and Sander L. Koole. “The Embodied Self: Making a Fist Enhances Men’s Power-Related Self-Conceptions.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 45.4 (2009): 828–834.Schubert, Thomas W. “The Power in Your Hand: Gender Differences in Bodily Feedback from Making a Fist.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 30.6 (2004): 757–769.Silverman, Kaja. The Threshold of the Visible World. New York: Routledge, 1996.Szylak, Aneta. The Field Is to the Sky, Only Backwards. Brooklyn, NY: International Studio and Curatorial Program, 2013.Young, Iris Marion. “Breasted Experience: The Look and the Feeling.” On Female Body Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

IntroductionLike other forms of embodiment, pregnancy has increasingly become subject to representation and interpretation via digital technologies. Pregnancy and the unborn entity were largely private, and few people beyond the pregnant women herself had access to the foetus growing within her (Duden). Now pregnant and foetal bodies have become open to public portrayal and display (Lupton The Social Worlds of the Unborn). A plethora of online materials – websites depicting the unborn entity from the moment of conception, amateur YouTube videos of births, social media postings of ultrasounds and self-taken photos (‘selfies’) showing changes in pregnant bellies, and so on – now ensure the documentation of pregnant and unborn bodies in extensive detail, rendering them open to other people’s scrutiny. Other recent digital technologies directed at pregnancy include mobile software applications, or ‘apps’. In this article, we draw on our study involving a critical discourse analysis of a corpus of pregnancy-related apps offered in the two major app stores. In so doing, we discuss the ways in which pregnancy-related apps portray pregnant and unborn bodies. We place a particular focus on the ludification and gamification strategies employed to position pregnancy as a playful, creative and fulfilling experience that is frequently focused on consumption. As we will demonstrate, these strategies have wider implications for concepts of pregnant and foetal embodiment and subjectivity.It is important here to make a distinction between ludification and gamification. Ludification is a broader term than gamification. It is used in the academic literature on gaming (sometimes referred to as ‘ludology’) to refer to elements of games reaching into other aspects of life beyond leisure pursuits (Frissen et al. Playful Identities: The Ludification of Digital Media Cultures; Raessens). Frissen et al. (Frissen et al. "Homo Ludens 2.0: Play, Media and Identity") for example, claim that even serious pursuits such as work, politics, education and warfare have been subjected to ludification. They note that digital technologies in general tend to incorporate ludic dimensions. Gamification has been described as ‘the use of game design elements in non-game contexts’ (Deterding et al. 9). The term originated in the digital media industry to describe the incorporation of features into digital technologies that not explicitly designed as games, such as competition, badges, rewards and fun that engaged and motivated users to make them more enjoyable to use. Gamification is now often used in literatures on marketing strategies, persuasive computing or behaviour modification. It is an important element of ‘nudge’, an approach to behaviour change that involves persuasion over coercion (Jones, Pykett and Whitehead). Gamification thus differs from ludification in that the former involves applying ludic principles for reasons other than the pleasures of enjoying the game for their own sake, often to achieve objectives set by actors and agencies other than the gamer. Indeed, this is why gamification software has been described by Bogost (Bogost) as ‘exploitationware’. Analysing Pregnancy AppsMobile apps have become an important medium in contemporary digital technology use. As of May 2015, 1.5 million apps were available to download on Google Play while 1.4 million were available in the Apple App Store (Statista). Apps related to pregnancy are a popular item in app stores, frequently appearing on the Apple App Store’s list of most-downloaded apps. Google Play’s figures show that many apps directed at pregnant women have been downloaded hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of times. For example, ‘Pregnancy +’, ‘I’m Expecting - Pregnancy App’ and ‘What to Expect - Pregnancy Tracker’ have each been downloaded between one and five million times, while ‘My Pregnancy Today’ has received between five and ten million downloads. Pregnancy games for young girls are also popular. Google Play figures show that the ‘Pregnant Emergency Doctor’ game, for example, has received between one and five million downloads. Research has found that pregnant women commonly download pregnancy-related apps and find them useful sources of information and support (Hearn, Miller and Fletcher; Rodger et al.; Kraschnewski et al.; Declercq et al.; Derbyshire and Dancey; O'Higgins et al.). We conducted a comprehensive analysis of all pregnancy-related smartphone apps in the two major app stores, Apple App Store and Google Play, in late June 2015. Android and Apple’s iOS have a combined market share of 91 percent of apps installed on mobile phones (Seneviratne et al.). A search for all pregnancy-related apps offered in these stores used key terms such as pregnancy, childbirth, conception, foetus/fetus and baby. After eliminating apps listed in these searches that were clearly not human pregnancy-related, 665 apps on Google Play and 1,141 on the Apple App Store remained for inclusion in our study. (Many of these apps were shared across the stores.)We carried out a critical discourse analysis of these apps, looking closely at the app descriptions offered in the two stores. We adopted the perspective that sees apps, like any other form of media, as sociocultural artefacts that both draw on and reproduce shared norms, ideals, knowledges and beliefs (Lupton "Quantified Sex: A Critical Analysis of Sexual and Reproductive Self-Tracking Using Apps"; Millington "Smartphone Apps and the Mobile Privatization of Health and Fitness"; Lupton "Apps as Artefacts: Towards a Critical Perspective on Mobile Health and Medical Apps"). In undertaking our analysis of the app descriptions in our corpus, attention was paid to the title of each app, the textual accounts of its content and use and the images that were employed, such as the logo of the app and the screenshots that were used to illustrate its content and style. Our focus in this article is on the apps that we considered as including elements of entertainment. Pregnancy-related game apps were by far the largest category of the apps in our corpus. These included games for young girls and expectant fathers as well as apps for ultrasound manipulation, pregnancy pranks, foetal sex prediction, choosing baby names, and quizzes. Less obviously, many other apps included in our analysis offered some elements of gamification and ludification, and these were considered in our analysis. ‘Pregnant Adventures’: App Games for GirlsOne of the major genres of apps that we identified was games directed at young girls. These apps invited users to shop for clothes, dress up, give a new hair style, ‘make-over’ and otherwise beautify a pregnant woman. These activities were directed at the goal of improving the physical attractiveness and therefore (it was suggested) the confidence of the woman, who was presented as struggling with coming to terms with changes in her body during pregnancy. Other apps for this target group involved the player assuming the role of a doctor in conducting medical treatments for injured pregnant women or assisting the birth of her baby.Many of these games represented the pregnant woman visually as looking like an archetypal Barbie doll, with a wardrobe to match. One app (‘Barbara Pregnancy Shopping’) even uses the name ‘Barbara’ and the screenshots show a woman similar in appearance to the doll. Its description urges players to use the game to ‘cheer up’ an ‘unconfident’ Barbara by taking her on a ‘shopping spree’ for new, glamorous clothes ‘to make Barbara feel beautiful throughout her pregnancy’. Players may find ‘sparkly accessories’ as well for Barbara and help her find a new hairstyle so that she ‘can be her fashionable self again’ and ‘feel prepared to welcome her baby!’. Likewise, the game ‘Pregnant Mommy Makeover Spa’ involves players selecting clothes, applying beauty treatments and makeup and adding accessories to give a makeover to ‘Pregnant Princess’ Leila. The ‘Celebrity Mommy’s Newborn Baby Doctor’ game combines the drawcard of ‘celebrity’ with ‘mommy’. Players are invited to ‘join the celebrities in their pregnancy adventure!’ and ‘take care of Celebrity Mom during her pregnancy!’.An app by the same developer of ‘Barbara Pregnancy Shopping’ also offers ‘Barbara’s Caesarean Birth’. The app description claims that: ‘Of course her poor health doesn’t allow Barbara to give birth to her baby herself.’ It is up to players to ‘make everything perfect’ for Barbara’s caesarean birth. The screenshots show Barbara’s pregnant abdomen being slit open, retracted and a rosy, totally clean infant extracted from the incision, complete with blonde hair. Players then sew up the wound. A final screenshot displays an image of a smiling Barbara standing holding her sleeping, swaddled baby, with the words ‘You win’.Similar games involve princesses, mermaids, fairies and even monster and vampire pregnant women giving birth either vaginally or by caesarean. Despite their preternatural status, the monster and vampire women conform to the same aesthetic as the other pregnant women in these games: usually with long hair and pretty, made-up faces, wearing fashionable clothing even on the operating table. Their newborn infants are similarly uniform in their appearance as they emerge from the uterus. They are white-skinned, clean and cherubic (described in ‘Mommy’s Newborn Baby Princess’ as ‘the cutest baby you probably want’), a far cry from the squalling, squashed-faced infants smeared in birth fluids produced by the real birth process.In these pregnancy games for girls, the pain and intense bodily effort of birthing and the messiness produced by the blood and other body fluids inherent to the process of labour and birth are completely missing. The fact that caesarean birth is a major abdominal surgery requiring weeks of recovery is obviated in these games. Apart from the monsters and vampires, who may have green- or blue-hued skin, nearly all other pregnant women are portrayed as white-skinned, young, wearing makeup and slim, conforming to conventional stereotypical notions of female beauty. In these apps, the labouring women remain glamorous, usually smiling, calm and unsullied by the visceral nature of birth.‘Track Your Pregnancy Day by Day’: Self-Monitoring and Gamified PregnancyElements of gamification were evident in a large number of the apps in our corpus, including many apps that invite pregnant users to engage in self-tracking of their bodies and that of their foetuses. Users are asked to customise the apps to document their changing bodies and track their foetus’ development as part of reproducing the discourse of the miraculous nature of pregnancy and promoting the pleasures of self-tracking and self-transformation from pregnant woman to mother. When using the ‘Pregnancy+’ app, for example, users can choose to construct a ‘Personal Dashboard’ that includes details of their pregnancy. They can input their photograph, first name and their expected date of delivery so that that each daily update begins with ‘Hello [name of user], you are [ ] weeks and [ ] days pregnant’ with the users’ photograph attached to the message. The woman’s weight gain over time and a foetal kick counter are also included in this app. It provides various ways for users to mark the passage of time, observe the ways in which their foetuses change and move week by week and monitor changes in their bodies. According to the app description for ‘My Pregnancy Today’, using such features allows a pregnant woman to: ‘Track your pregnancy day by day.’ Other apps encourage women to track such aspects of physical activity, vitamin and fluid intake, diet, mood and symptoms. The capacity to visually document the pregnant user’s body is also a feature of several apps. The ‘Baby Bump Pregnancy’, ‘WebMD Pregnancy’, ‘I’m Expecting’,’iPregnant’ and ‘My Pregnancy Today’ apps, for example, all offer an album feature for pregnant bump photos taken by the user of herself (described as a ‘bumpie’ in the blurb for ‘My Pregnancy Today’). ‘Baby Buddy’ encourages women to create a pregnant avatar of themselves (looking glamorous, well-dressed and happy). Some apps even advise users on how they should feel. As a screenshot from ‘Pregnancy Tracker Week by Week’ claims: ‘Victoria, your baby is growing in your body. You should be the happiest woman in the world.’Just as pregnancy games for little girls portrayal pregnancy as a commodified and asetheticised experience, the apps directed at pregnant women themselves tend to shy away from discomforting fleshly realities of pregnant and birthing embodiment. Pregnancy is represented as an enjoyable and fashionable state of embodiment: albeit one that requires constant self-surveillance and vigilance.‘Hello Mommy!’: The Personalisation and Aestheticisation of the FoetusA dominant feature of pregnancy-related apps is the representation of the foetus as already a communicative person in its own right. For example, the ‘Pregnancy Tickers – Widget’ app features the image of a foetus (looking far more like an infant, with a full head of wavy hair and open eyes) holding a pencil and marking a tally on the walls of the uterus. The app is designed to provide various icons showing the progress of the user’s pregnancy each day on her mobile device. The ‘Hi Mommy’ app features a cartoon-like pink and cuddly foetus looking very baby-like addressing its mother from the womb, as in the following message that appears on the user’s smartphone: ‘Hi Mommy! When will I see you for the first time?’ Several pregnancy-tracking apps also allow women to input the name that they have chosen for their expected baby, to receive customised notifications of its progress (‘Justin is nine weeks and two days old today’).Many apps also incorporate images of foetuses that represent them as wondrous entities, adopting the visual style of 1960s foetal photography pioneer Lennart Nilsson, or what Stormer (Stormer) has referred to as ‘prenatal sublimity’. The ‘Pregnancy+’ app features such images. Users can choose to view foetal development week-by-week as a colourful computerised animation or 2D and 3D ultrasound scans that have been digitally manipulated to render them aesthetically appealing. These images replicate the softly pink, glowing portrayals of miraculous unborn life typical of Nilsson’s style.Other apps adopt a more contemporary aesthetic and allow parents to store and manipulate images of their foetal ultrasounds and then share them via social media. The ‘Pimp My Ultrasound’ app, for example, invites prospective parents to manipulate images of their foetal ultrasounds by adding in novelty features to the foetal image such as baseball caps, jewellery, credit cards and musical instruments. The ‘Hello Mom’ app creates a ‘fetal album’ of ultrasounds taken of the user’s foetus, while the ‘Ultrasound Viewer’ app lets users manipulate their 3/4 D foetal ultrasound images: ‘Have fun viewing it from every angle, rotating, panning and zooming to see your babies [sic] features and share with your family and friends via Facebook and Twitter! … Once uploaded, you can customise your scan with a background colour and skin colour of your choice’.DiscussionPregnancy, like any other form of embodiment, is performative. Pregnant women are expected to conform to norms and assumptions about their physical appearance and deportment of their bodies that expect them to remain well-groomed, fit and physically attractive without appearing overly sexual (Longhurst "(Ad)Dressing Pregnant Bodies in New Zealand: Clothing, Fashion, Subjectivities and Spatialities"; Longhurst "'Corporeographies’ of Pregnancy: ‘Bikini Babes'"; Nash; Littler). Simultaneously they must negotiate the burden of bodily management in the interests of risk regulation. They are expected to protect their vulnerable unborn from potential dangers by stringently disciplining their bodies and policing to what substances they allow entry (Lupton The Social Worlds of the Unborn; Lupton "'Precious Cargo': Risk and Reproductive Citizenship"). Pregnancy self-tracking apps enact the soft politics of algorithmic authority, encouraging people to conform to expectations of self-responsibility and self-management by devoting attention to monitoring their bodies and acting on the data that they generate (Whitson; Millington "Amusing Ourselves to Life: Fitness Consumerism and the Birth of Bio-Games"; Lupton The Quantified Self: A Sociology of Self-Tracking).Many commentators have remarked on the sexism inherent in digital games (e.g. Dickerman, Christensen and Kerl-McClain; Thornham). Very little research has been conducted specifically on the gendered nature of app games. However our analysis suggests that, at least in relation to the pregnant woman, reductionist heteronormative, cisgendered, patronising and paternalistic stereotypes abound. In the games for girls, pregnant women are ideally young, heterosexual, partnered, attractive, slim and well-groomed, before, during and after birth. In self-tracking apps, pregnant women are portrayed as ideally self-responsible, enthused about their pregnancy and foetus to the point that they are counting the days until the birth and enthusiastic about collecting and sharing details about themselves and their unborn (often via social media).Ambivalence about pregnancy, the foetus or impending motherhood, and lack of interest in monitoring the pregnancy or sharing details of it with others are not accommodated, acknowledged or expected by these apps. Acknowledgement of the possibility of pregnant women who are not overtly positive about their pregnancy or lack interest in it or who identify as transgender or lesbian or who are sole mothers is distinctly absent.Common practices we noted in apps – such as giving foetuses names before birth and representing them as verbally communicating with their mothers from inside the womb – underpin a growing intensification around the notion of the unborn entity as already an infant and social actor in its own right. These practices have significant implications for political agendas around the treatment of pregnant women in terms of their protection or otherwise of their unborn, and for debates about women’s reproductive rights and access to abortion (Lupton The Social Worlds of the Unborn; Taylor The Public Life of the Fetal Sonogram: Technology, Consumption and the Politics of Reproduction). Further, the gamification and ludification of pregnancy serve to further commodify the experience of pregnancy and childbirth, contributing to an already highly commercialised environment in which expectant parents, and particularly mothers, are invited to purchase many goods and services related to pregnancy and early parenthood (Taylor "Of Sonograms and Baby Prams: Prenatal Diagnosis, Pregnancy, and Consumption"; Kroløkke; Thomson et al.; Taylor The Public Life of the Fetal Sonogram: Technology, Consumption and the Politics of Reproduction; Thomas).In the games for girls we examined, the pregnant woman herself was a commodity, a selling point for the app. The foetus was also frequently commodified in its representation as an aestheticised entity and the employment of its image (either as an ultrasound or other visual representations) or identity to market apps such as the girls’ games, apps for manipulating ultrasound images, games for predicting the foetus’ sex and choosing its name, and prank apps using fake ultrasounds purporting to reveal a foetus inside a person’s body. As the pregnant user engages in apps, she becomes a commodity in yet another way: the generator of personal data that are marketable in themselves. In this era of the digital data knowledge economy, the personal information about people gathered from their online interactions and content creation has become highly profitable for third parties (Andrejevic; van Dijck). Given that pregnant women are usually in the market for many new goods and services, their personal data is a key target for data mining companies, who harvest it to sell to advertisers (Marwick).To conclude, our analysis suggests that gamification and ludification strategies directed at pregnancy and childbirth can serve to obfuscate the societal pressures that expect and seek to motivate pregnant women to maintain physical fitness and attractiveness, simultaneously ensuring that they protect their foetuses from all possible risks. In achieving both ends, women are encouraged to engage in intense self-monitoring and regulation of their bodies. These apps also reproduce concepts of the unborn entity as a precious and beautiful already-human. These types of portrayals have important implications for how young girls learn about pregnancy and childbirth, for pregnant women’s experiences and for concepts of foetal personhood that in turn may influence women’s reproductive rights and abortion politics.ReferencesAndrejevic, Mark. Infoglut: How Too Much Information Is Changing the Way We Think and Know. New York: Routledge, 2013. Print.Bogost, Ian. "Why Gamification Is Bullshit." The Gameful World: Approaches, Issues, Applications. Eds. Steffen Walz and Sebastian Deterding. Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2015. 65-80. Print.Declercq, E.R., et al. Listening to Mothers III: Pregnancy and Birth. New York: Childbirth Connection, 2013. Print.Derbyshire, Emma, and Darren Dancey. "Smartphone Medical Applications for Women's Health: What Is the Evidence-Base and Feedback?" International Journal of Telemedicine and Applications (2013).Deterding, Sebastian, et al. "From Game Design Elements to Gamefulness: Defining Gamification." Proceedings of the 15th International Academic MindTrek Conference: Envisioning Future Media Environments. ACM, 2011. Dickerman, Charles, Jeff Christensen, and Stella Beatríz Kerl-McClain. "Big Breasts and Bad Guys: Depictions of Gender and Race in Video Games." Journal of Creativity in Mental Health 3.1 (2008): 20-29. Duden, Barbara. Disembodying Women: Perspectives on Pregnancy and the Unborn. Trans. Lee Hoinacki. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Frissen, Valerie, et al. "Homo Ludens 2.0: Play, Media and Identity." Playful Identities: The Ludification of Digital Media Cultures. Eds. Valerie Frissen et al. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2015. 9-50. ———, eds. Playful Identities: The Ludification of Digital Media Cultures. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015. Hearn, Lydia, Margaret Miller, and Anna Fletcher. "Online Healthy Lifestyle Support in the Perinatal Period: What Do Women Want and Do They Use It?" Australian Journal of Primary Health 19.4 (2013): 313-18. Jones, Rhys, Jessica Pykett, and Mark Whitehead. "Big Society's Little Nudges: The Changing Politics of Health Care in an Age of Austerity." Political Insight 1.3 (2010): 85-87. Kraschnewski, L. Jennifer, et al. "Paging “Dr. Google”: Does Technology Fill the Gap Created by the Prenatal Care Visit Structure? Qualitative Focus Group Study with Pregnant Women." Journal of Medical Internet Research. 16.6 (2014): e147. Kroløkke, Charlotte. "On a Trip to the Womb: Biotourist Metaphors in Fetal Ultrasound Imaging." Women's Studies in Communication 33.2 (2010): 138-53. Littler, Jo. "The Rise of the 'Yummy Mummy': Popular Conservatism and the Neoliberal Maternal in Contemporary British Culture." Communication, Culture & Critique 6.2 (2013): 227-43. Longhurst, Robyn. "(Ad)Dressing Pregnant Bodies in New Zealand: Clothing, Fashion, Subjectivities and Spatialities." Gender, Place & Culture 12.4 (2005): 433-46. ———. "'Corporeographies’ of Pregnancy: ‘Bikini Babes'." Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18.4 (2000): 453-72. Lupton, Deborah. "Apps as Artefacts: Towards a Critical Perspective on Mobile Health and Medical Apps." Societies 4.4 (2014): 606-22. ———. "'Precious Cargo': Risk and Reproductive Citizenship." Critical Public Health 22.3 (2012): 329-40. ———. The Quantified Self: A Sociology of Self-Tracking. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016. ———. "Quantified Sex: A Critical Analysis of Sexual and Reproductive Self-Tracking Using Apps." Culture, Health & Sexuality 17.4 (2015): 440-53. ———. The Social Worlds of the Unborn. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Marwick, Alice. "How Your Data Are Being Deeply Mined." The New York Review of Books (2014). Millington, Brad. "Amusing Ourselves to Life: Fitness Consumerism and the Birth of Bio-Games." Journal of Sport & Social Issues 38.6 (2014): 491-508. ———. "Smartphone Apps and the Mobile Privatization of Health and Fitness." Critical Studies in Media Communication 31.5 (2014): 479-93. Nash, Meredith. Making 'Postmodern' Mothers: Pregnant Embodiment, Baby Bumps and Body Image. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. O'Higgins, A., et al. "The Use of Digital Media by Women Using the Maternity Services in a Developed Country." Irish Medical Journal 108.5 (2015). Raessens, Joost. "Playful Identities, or the Ludification of Culture." Games and Culture 1.1 (2006): 52-57. Rodger, D., et al. "Pregnant Women’s Use of Information and Communications Technologies to Access Pregnancy-Related Health Information in South Australia." Australian Journal of Primary Health 19.4 (2013): 308-12. Seneviratne, Suranga, et al. "Your Installed Apps Reveal Your Gender and More!" Mobile Computing and Communications Review 18.3 (2015): 55-61. Statista. "Number of Apps Available in Leading App Stores as of May 2015." 2015. Stormer, Nathan. "Looking in Wonder: Prenatal Sublimity and the Commonplace 'Life'." Signs 33.3 (2008): 647-73. Taylor, Janelle. "Of Sonograms and Baby Prams: Prenatal Diagnosis, Pregnancy, and Consumption." Feminist Studies 26.2 (2000): 391-418. ———. The Public Life of the Fetal Sonogram: Technology, Consumption and the Politics of Reproduction. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008. Thomas, Gareth M. "Picture Perfect: ‘4d’ Ultrasound and the Commoditisation of the Private Prenatal Clinic." Journal of Consumer Culture. Online first, 2015. Thomson, Rachel, et al. Making Modern Mothers. Bristol: Policy Press, 2011. Thornham, Helen. “'It's a Boy Thing'.” Feminist Media Studies 8.2 (2008): 127-42. Van Dijck, José. "Datafication, Dataism and Dataveillance: Big Data between Scientific Paradigm and Ideology." Surveillance & Society 12.2 (2014): 197-208. Whitson, Jennifer. "Gaming the Quantified Self." Surveillance & Society 11.1/2 (2013): 163-76.