When Self-Care is Not Neoliberal: Insights from Black, Decolonial, and Disability Feminisms

When Self-Care is Not Neoliberal: Insights from Black, Decolonial, and Disability Feminisms

Feminist theorists have critiqued the twenty-first-century turn towards self-care as neoliberal, arguing that personal wellness masks the welfare state's destruction. I clarify an ambiguity in the argument against self-care's purported neoliberalism, distinguishing three strands of critique: that self-care is too individual, that self-care is too commercial, and that self-care involves a shift in who is responsible for the reproduction of subjects, from the state to the individual. It is in the Foucauldian critique of self-care as responsibilizing that arguments against self-care's purported neoliberalism are sharpest. Yet, care for the self is more ambivalent than these arguments admit. Self-care has remained important to Black feminists, feminist scholars of disability, and decolonial feminists, including many explicitly critical of neoliberalism. Attending to the particular contexts from which calls for self-care emerge demonstrate how self-care is compatible with a critique of neoliberalism and can serve as a critique of neoliberalism itself. Neoliberalism is borne disproportionately by Black women, disabled people, and the Indigenous. Members of these groups have historical reasons to distrust the state's claim to care. They have also been tasked with caring for others instead of for themselves. Finally, care for the self can articulate a refusal of optimization that neoliberalism demands.

One. Self-care and the threat of neoliberalism

Mainstream feminism, scholars fear, is complicit with financialized capitalism in new ways. Expanding on Marxist feminist critiques, scholars of neoliberalism highlight issues specific to this form of capitalism, taking issue with what they call "lean-in feminism" or "progressive neoliberalism". Feminists, these scholars fret, promote the representation of women to the ranks of the privileged while ignoring the structures of power that underlie these very designations. Still others draw on a Foucauldian tradition, arguing that neoliberalism calls forth new kinds of feminist subjects concerned with being entrepreneurs of the self. How, many longstanding feminists rightly wonder, does the feminist movement-one so concerned with emancipation-risk complicity with the structures of neoliberalism?

Critics see neoliberalism, not least, in recent calls for self-care that have grown since the mid-twenty tens. The New Yorker, New York Times, and The Baffler all had articles on care for "self, body and/or soul," and these articles underscore several claims for self-care's neoliberalism: the way that care for the self can involve performative self-improvement, for example, or how self-care can become a justification for more consumption. Leigh Stein's novel Self-Care, published in twenty twenty, featured two women running a wellness start-up and was read as a critique of neoliberalism's hold on feminism today. Reviewers saw the book as pillorying "modern feminism's transformation into a commercialized hellscape of goat yoga, healing crystals and girl bosses."

In feminist scholarship and in the public sphere, the backlash against self-care may have reached its apex; critics now have taken to defending care for the self. Many, both in scholarship on self-care and in the public sphere, adjudicate debates about self-care's complicity with neoliberalism through definitions of what counts as self-care. Some practices are defined as politicized self-care (worthwhile and not neoliberal), while others are deemed depolicitized or "faux" forms of self-care (unworthy and neoliberal). In a recent article for Signs, for example, Lena Zuckerwise defends Black feminist practices of self-care stemming from Audre Lorde against the charge that self-care is "no more than an uninspired neoliberal construct." Radical self-care, she argues, is distinct from white wellness, with its emphasis on consumption of scented candles and gym memberships. What is missed, however, in using genealogies of self-care to redeem certain traditions of self-care while dismissing others, is both close attention to what the charge of neoliberalism amounts to and how calls to self-care are sometimes mobilized in the context of critiquing neoliberalism.

Accordingly, I understand self-care, following Laura Martínez-Jiménez, in a way that does not settle the question of neoliberalism definitionally. Self-care is a person's accountability for the sustainability and flourishing of their own life, i.e. the practices, relationships and activities that the person performs or participates in for the purpose of satisfying (part of) their own needs and desires for care, from the most ordinary and mechanical ones to those linked to pleasure, rest or the affective-emotional and political encounter with other people.

This paper begins by defining self-care and identifying an ambiguity in arguments directed against self-care's purported neoliberalism, distinguishing three strands of critique: that self-care is too individual, that self-care is too commercial, and that self-care involves shifting responsibility for well-being from the state to the individual. It is in the Foucauldian critique of self-care as responsibilizing that I find arguments against self-care's purported neoliberalism are sharpest (section two). Yet care for the self should be understood as ambivalent: far from being only about shifting burdens of responsibility, self-care has remained important to Black feminists, feminist scholars of disability, and decolonial feminists, including many who are explicitly critical of neoliberalism (section three). Attending to the particular contexts from which scholars' calls for self-care emerge helps us better understand how self-care is both compatible with a critique of neoliberalism and can serve as a critique of neoliberalism itself. The burdens of neoliberalism are asymmetrical, and members of some groups bear the brunt of neoliberalism to a greater extent than others (section four). Many groups too have historical reasons to distrust the state and its purported insistence on care (section five). Further, because the work of caring for others often falls to members of particular groups, we should understand their advocacy for care of the self as rejecting the disproportionate burdens to care for others that many women face (section six). Finally, care for the self does not always translate into the increased productivity that neoliberalism demands (section seven). Instead, calls to care for the self can articulate a refusal of optimization.