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Decolonize Self-Care

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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.

Decolonize Self-Care is the third book in the series Decolonize That! Handbooks for the Revolutionary Overthrow of Embedded Colonial Ideas.

Contributors

Alyson K. Spurgas

Alyson K. Spurgas is associate professor of Sociology and affiliated faculty in the Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. Spurgas researches, writes, and teaches about the sociology of trauma, the politics of desire, and technologies of care from an interdisciplinary and intersectional feminist perspective. They are also the author of Diagnosing Desire: Biopolitics and Femininity into the Twenty-First Century (The Ohio State University Press, 2020), which won the 2021 Cultural Studies Association First Book Prize. Alyson lives in Brooklyn, New York, with their amazing partner and cat.

Zoë Meleo-Erwin

Zoë Meleo-Erwin is a qualitative sociologist and former assistant professor of public health. In 2022, she left academia to pursue a career as a user experience researcher in the tech industry. As a scholar, her work focused on the meanings of health and illness, health decision-making, experiences of embodiment, and the ways in which digital technologies facilitate the creation of both identity and community around health and illness.
Chapter Title Contents Contributors Pages Year Price

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In the Preface, series editor Bhakti Shringarpure reflects on modern self-care in the era of social media, mega influencers, neo-liberal hustle, and colonial ideologies. 8 $0.80

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The authors contextualize modern self-care, its relation to corporate marketing, its individualization, and how the movement can be tied to intersecting systems of oppression including … ; 49 $4.90

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Chapter 1 discussed women’s work, the gendered origins of multitasking, as well as sex as self-care. The authors detailed the idea that women are inherently prone to multitasking, therefore … ; 43 $4.30

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Chapter 2 discussed the modern prioritization of the personal benefits of self-care that are marketable and make white, rich, cis, and heteronormative femininity commodifiable. The authors … ; 52 $5.20

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Chapter 3 discussed food in relation to modern self-care movements and practices. The authors discussed gluten-free, other specialty diets, the colonial and Western history of natural food diets, … ; 52 $5.20

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Chapter 4 discussed the self-care industry’s use of social justice language as it continues to be a market that relies on inspiration and appropriation of indigenity and other cultural … ; 36 $3.60