What Is Wellness Now?

Wellness is a popular buzzword these days. One finds wellness programs, wellness centers, wellness contests, wellness conferences, wellness journals, wellness administrators, wellness awards, wellness tourism, and even a Wellness brand cat and dog food (complete with its own blog and website asking, ‘‘What is true wellness?’’). Like ‘‘intersectionality’’ in feminist scholarship (Davis 2008), the rise of ‘‘diversity’’ over affirmative action (Kelly and Dobbin 1998; Edelman, Fuller, and Mara-Drita 2001), ‘‘sustainability’’ in approaches to the natural world and its use and development (Scoones 2007), and ‘‘sexual health’’ in place of panic over sexually transmitted infections (Epstein and Mamo 2011), the hegemony of the buzzword wellness signals its usefulness for framing consensus in contemporary American society. That consensus is that health is more than just the absence of disease, that health promotion and prevention of disease should be a top governmental and personal priority, and that each individual can and should strive to achieve a state of optimal functioning. But in