Feeling safe: Safety app discourse and affective labor

Abstract

The surveillant capacities of smart phones have generated an array of safety apps targeting cis female users. Current feminist scholarship studies these apps from a variety of disciplinary perspectives that stress their detractors, namely, that they are largely ineffective and that they instead burden the user with the labor of continuous assessment of oneself and one’s surroundings. This article acknowledges the apps’ numerous failings while at the same time turning attention to the surveilled, responsible, projected user they reproduce in order to tease out some of the internal contradictions and nuances of this figure and its place in digital culture. The study samples a number of safety apps that focus on gender violence in public spaces and finds that the apps solicit a form of gendered labor which asks largely cis women users to work towards ‘feelings’ of safety.