“I Am Writing You in Reference to Myself”: White Wellness, Black Feminism, and the Politics of Self-Care

The meaning of self-care is expansive and ambiguous. Today it encompasses disparate products and practices from scented candles to vegan diets to bingeable television; it includes both healthy habits and extravagant indulgences; it is simultaneously heralded as a political act and a necessary reprieve from politics. It is material and purchasable as well as intangible and existential. Because of its ties to conspicuous consumption, influencer culture, and neoliberal feminism, self-care is perhaps easily dismissible as insignificant and apolitical white feminine navel-gazing. In one sense, this is understandable, given that terms like "feminism," "empowerment," and "freedom" are mobilized to market luxury items to white wealthy women. Relatedly, white wellness discourse foregrounds health-promoting perks for employees of wealthy corporations and places responsibility for health squarely on the shoulders of individuals rather than the state. However, I argue that feminist critiques of self-care are often undergirded by constructs of self that do not map onto Black feminist traditions or Black women's lived experiences. Indeed, both are overlooked by the pervasive view that self-care is antipolitical, at odds with collective action, and no more than an uninspired neoliberal construct. When the self is the very site of domination, exclusion, and erasure, self-care demands assiduous political analysis. This article contends that, for Black women, self-care has been a mode of resistance to and survival under white domination since slavery. However, it is often obscured as such, both by the commodification of self-care in the economy and by the hegemonic white constructs of self in the academy.