Alyson K. Spurgas

Decolonize Self-Care - Decolonize That! Alyson K. Spurgas

Decolonize Self-Care is aligned with the spirit and vision of public sociology and the medical humanities. Spurgas and Meleo-Erwin offer a critical investigation into contemporary "self-care" practices-particularly those that embrace using mindfulness and other techniques to care for the self, 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 marketed to and by wealthy, cisgender, white women in the global north. Further, Spurgas and Meleo-Erwin contend that the rhetoric of "feminism" is regularly co-opted in selling self-care, and that it is a specifically white liberal feminism, with wealthy white women being the primary beneficiaries and those who literally profit from self-care entrepreneurship and the products and regimens it creates. 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 tend to allow. A smart and funny read, the book speaks to academic and lay audiences alike.