Decolonize Self-Care

by Alyson K. Spurgas, Bhakti Shringarpure (Editor), Zoe Meleo Erwin

Overview

Decolonize Self-Care mounts a sharply critical investigation into contemporary “self-care” practices—particularly those that embrace using mindfulness and other techniques such as tantra and yoga, as well as gluten-free and low-carbohydrate diets. The authors argue that “self-care” has become an industry, and one that is often marketed to and by wealthy, cisgender, white women in the global north.

Spurgas and Meleo-Erwin contend that the rhetoric of “feminism” is regularly co-opted in selling self-care, with wealthy white women being the primary consumer target and also those who profit from self-care entrepreneurship. Through careful research and sharp analysis, the authors offer a vision of more radical, communal, collective, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist forms of care for chronic pain, burnout, depression, anxiety, and other conditions which are often the result of gendered, sexualized, racialized, ableist, and colonialist traumas under late capitalism. Utilizing critical feminist disability studies, madness studies, Black feminist scholarship, decolonial theory, and other intersectional and Marxist feminist critique, the authors re-theorize care outside of and beyond what current self-care rhetorics generally allow. A smart and often laugh-out-loud read, Decolonize Self-Care speaks to academic and lay audiences alike.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781682193365
Publisher:	OR Books
Publication date:	01/31/2023
Series:	Decolonize That!
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	220
File size:	614 KB

About the Author

Alyson K. Spurgas is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, where they also teach in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. Alyson is the author of Diagnosing Desire: Biopolitics and Femininity into the Twenty-First Century (Ohio State University Press, 2020), which was awarded the 2021 Cultural Studies Association First Book Prize, and is currently conducting research for a new project on sexual robotics and technologized care. Alyson lives in Brooklyn, New York with their partner and cat – and enjoys bicycling around the neighborhood, getting out of the city to go for a hike, listening to (and sometimes playing) live music, and might even be found doing yoga once in a while.

Zoë Meleo-Erwin is a sociologist specializing in qualitative data collection methods with over a decade of experience. In January (of 2022) she left academia to begin a position in tech as a UX researcher at a major global tech company. Prior to this, Zoë was an Assistant Professor of Public Health at William Paterson University. Zoë’s academic subject areas of expertise pertained to the relationship between social media and health-related thoughts, beliefs, behaviors, identities, and communities and the interrelationship between different levels of influence. While in academia she published a number of manuscripts and presented nationally as well as internationally on these topics, a list of which can be found at www.zoemeleoerwin.com.

Bhakti Shringarpure is editor-in-chief of Warscapes magazine. She is the author of Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital and co-editor of the forthcoming Insurgent Feminisms: Women Write War. She has written for The Guardian, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Africa is a Country, among other places.

Table of Contents

Editor's Preface 1

Introduction 9

Chapter 1 How to Have Amazing Sex (and Become Your Best Self in the Process): Harness Your Receptive Femininity and Practice Mindfulness! 59

Chapter 2 Marketing Self-Care: From FemTech and Biohacking to Painmoons and Extreme Travel 103

Chapter 3 You Can Nourish Your Family and Climb the Ladder of Success! The White Neoliberal Feminism and Hip Domesticity of Food-Based Health Movements 155

Chapter 4 More Care, Less Self? How to (Hopefully) Move Beyond Complaint, Critique, and Coloniality 207

References 243

Editorial Reviews

It often feels like there is nothing new to say about the contradictory politics of self-care. Behold Decolonize Self-Care. It brings a new diagnosis and critique to the crowded intersection of the self-care hot takes while making recommendations on both the theoretical and structural level. It is replete with insight on what perspective and practice is needed to survive the capitalist and racist day. It is smart, urgent, and often laugh out loud funny.
—Sarah Sharma, Associate Professor and Director of the ICCIT at the Universityof Toronto and author of In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics

Decolonize Self-Care not only details how far self care has traveled from its starting point as a Black feminist survival tactic, but how deeply and pervasively it has been transformed into highly monetized and self-serving logics. Throughout this hard-hitting book, they unfurl all the ways the poison of #SelfCare has been threaded into a wide array of seemingly disparate markets and movements. When Spurgas and Meleo-Erwin apply their incisive critique across the products and services we often consume as feel-good and healthy, their facades crumble, revealing much darker and more dangerous motives and outcomes. But they also provide a salve, urging readers to take on the task of more deference and less defensiveness, more collective action and less credit-card driven indulgence, that is, their prescription is more care, less self.
—Laura Mauldin, Associate Professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Universityof Connecticut

Decolonize Self-Care is a brisk and bracing dive into the colonial roots of contemporary wellness culture. Spurgas and Meleo-Erwin examine how the self-care industry continues primarily to benefit wealthy, white, western women in the global North, even as its proponents claim to have embraced new, inclusive, and social justice-oriented models of wellbeing. The authors make accessible complex concepts such as feminism, neoliberalism, and white supremacy in their analyses of how problematic notions of 'self-care' manifest in the examples of sexual enhancement, self-optimization, and diet.
—Colleen Derkatch, author of Why Wellness Sells

From the Publisher