Holding Contradiction: Self-Care, Political Healing, and the Social Reproduction of Struggles

It is notable that self-care has entered mainstream discourse alongside the concept of a “care crisis”: an alarming breakdown on the terrain of life-making that materialist feminists term social reproduction. Beyond the opportunism of the commodified wellness industry, this coupling serves as a reminder of the inextricable relation between the personal and the political when it comes to the politics of care. A politics of self-care removed from these crisis conditions is one of vacuous individualism at best. At the same time, recent Marxist feminist attempts to address social reproductive crises of care through an expanded class and labor frame risk depoliticizing the lived experience and embodied transformation so fundamental to feminist and intersectional knowledge and organizing. Bringing the lens of social reproduction together with radical self-care literature rooted in the work of Audre Lorde and Sara Ahmed, this article instead claims that care of self and community and the social reproduction of struggles are inseparable. I conclude by discussing peer-to-peer strategies developed by care workers and sex workers, the underappreciated role of such “counter-normative” care in sustaining broader social movements, and the political limits of labor, even for many reproductive workers themselves.