Self-care as resistance: Lorde, Foucault, and playfulness

Self-care as resistance: Lorde, Foucault, and playfulness

Abstract

Self-care has emerged as a critical practice of resistance in the current era of far-right resurgence. Building particularly on Audre Lorde's insights, scholars, activists, and cultural workers conceptualize self-care as an act of political defiance and a strategy of collective survival. This article brings three different views of self-care into conversation. Beginning with Lorde's vision and contrasting it with Michel Foucault's ethics of the self, I show that both thinkers illuminate political dimensions of care that have long resonated in queer and feminist thought. Lorde emphasizes self-care as survival and solidarity; Foucault foregrounds non-domination and the cultivation of freedom. Both confront the paradoxical relationship between withdrawal and engagement, solitude and community, availability and self-knowledge - not as problems to be solved but as constitutive ambiguities of radical politics. Building on these insights, I propose a third approach: self-care as playfulness. This approach foregrounds moments of forgetting oneself - of 'being no one' temporarily - while sustaining mutual recognition and responsibility for justice. Together, these three approaches reveal how the political significance of self-care crystallizes not in clarity or resolution but in the capacity to affirm and inhabit ambiguity as part of a reflective, engaged way of being in the world.

Introduction

Feminist scholars, activists and cultural critics have reclaimed self-care as a form of political resistance. Audre Lorde's assertion that 'caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare' resonates amid intensifying far-right mobilization and patterns of violence against marginalized communities. This renewed interest in Lorde - and in thinkers like Michel Foucault - reflects a broader desire to locate practices of care within struggles for survival, ethics and liberation.

At the same time, self-care has also drawn scholarly attention as a cultural and commercial phenomenon. It has become a multi-billion-dollar industry, marketed through corporate campaigns and pop-feminist influencer culture as relaxation or lifestyle branding. In this commercial form, self-care is often stripped of its political content and recast as an individual responsibility. Feminist scholars have critiqued this shift for reinforcing neoliberal consumerism and hyper-individualism. The emphasis on rest, retreat and boundary setting is particularly contentious at a time when collective action and solidarity are urgently needed. In response, many have been inclined to dismiss contemporary discourses of self-care as merely neoliberal appropriations of feminist practices. Yet alongside these critiques, a parallel current has emerged that seeks to reclaim self-care as a radical political concept - something, as Schulz et al. put it, 'beyond bubble baths and chocolate pralines'.

I aim to contribute to that effort. I will use the term 'self-care' to refer to practices of sustaining oneself ethically and politically in relation to structures of domination and resistance. It is not privatized self-improvement, but a practice of resistance, survival and interdependence. As both Lorde and Foucault argue, care of the self is not a retreat from the world but a political act of resistance and transformation.

Arguments for self-care raise enduring questions, however: How much can individuals give to collective projects without erasing themselves? How much can collectives ask of individuals and still remain liberatory? Recent feminist and queer interventions have reframed self-care as communal - emphasizing mutual support, shared nourishment and the labour of sustaining political engagement. Yet within such frameworks, self-care risks becoming seen as valuable only insofar as it serves a collective purpose. The right to withdraw, to change oneself or to play - without needing to justify those acts as politically useful - appears suspect as the tension between solitude and solidarity is resolved in favour of the latter.

This article does not aim to resolve such tensions between personal or individual needs and public or collective struggles but to hold space for them. I argue that the radical potential of self-care lies precisely in its affirmation of ambiguity. Feminist and queer theorists have long insisted on the generative power of paradox - its ability to resist normativity and open space for alternative visions. Following that tradition, I propose that self-care operates as a dynamic negotiation between solitude and solidarity, self-knowledge and social availability and finally, seriousness and play.

The last of these three conceptual pairs is a dimension of self-care that neither Lorde nor Foucault treated as such. Self-care as playfulness foregrounds pleasure, humour and creative release - not as distractions from political life but as practices of survival,

imagination and freedom. Play offers the possibility of becoming no one - or anyone - for a moment, while remaining accountable to others. It makes visible a further tension between the self and the collective: between the freedom to laugh and forget oneself and one's place in the world, on the one hand, and the necessity of recognition and responsibility - in other words, seriousness - on the other. Suggesting playfulness as a dimension of self-care thus brings forth an additional ambiguity.

Together, these three views - self-care as survival, as ethical transformation and as play - highlight the friction at the heart of care. Rather than undermining political clarity, I argue that these tensions are central to self-care's prefigurative potential. If care is to enact - even provisionally - the worlds that feminist scholars and activists hope to build, then it must make room for us not to choose but to claim and explore ways to care for the self and for the world equally and somehow at the same time. This is not a liberal claim about individual self-expression but an insistence that ambiguity - the coexistence of solitude and solidarity, self-knowledge and interdependence - is itself political.

In exploring these ideas, I draw not only on conventional theory but also on feminist and queer poetry and fiction. Just as substantial parts of feminist thought have emerged from artistic spheres, so too has the practice of self-care (which Lorde illustrates well, being both scholar and poet, as well as activist). In what follows, I develop this argument in two parts. The second section introduces ambiguity as a prefigurative political framework. The third to fifth sections explore the three concepts of self-care, focusing on the ways that ambiguity serves as the basic condition for each. I end with a concluding discussion, where I stress the prefigurative understanding of self-care that informs all three concepts of self-care.