Bring Your Best Self to Work Self-care under late capitalism
Written by Andy Chen, January 2019
During this recent holiday season, some online thinkpieces in the Western world focused on the new proliferation of self-care products among popular gift options– health foods, cosmetics, self-help books, essential oil diffusers– and the overwhelming co-option of this market by white middle-class women. The aim? To remind shoppers of the origins of self-care, and to encourage a more critical approach towards the consumption of commercialised self-care.
Unsurprisingly, the trend spiked online in reaction to the 2016 US presidential election; surprisingly (or also unsurprisingly), the majority of the media surrounding self-care, reflective of a rejection of the sociopolitical environment and of a new sense of vulnerability, has ultimately been produced by white women. Now that Valentine’s Day is approaching, articles are popping up on fitness and women’s health sites encouraging single women to “treat themselves”, with a variety of product suggestions under the category of ‘self-care’.
Now, I have no issue with the idea of checking out and recouping at the end of a difficult week, but this understanding of self-care has in fact largely sublimated the concept’s original polemical nature. In the words of Sara Ahmed, self-care is a form of warfare for women of colour living under late capitalism; it’s the management of the physical and psychic fatigue constantly administered by systemic violence, and the defiant insistence in an uncaring society that you are worthy of care. It’s tied to resistance and protest– or rather, it was.
The self-care trend, as it exists now, promotes individualism rather than united resistance. It dovetails with a number of other problematic fads in health and wellness, the least of which include the market for increasingly creative health supplements and mystic (orientalising) paraphernalia, aimed almost exclusively at affluent Western women. It’s a familiar sight in political and cultural history: the eventual monetisation of radical acts of rebellion, redirected towards mass consumers through excellent marketing, and their reshaping into artefacts of whiteness.
None of this is particularly new. However, I think there is something to be said for how widely this particular manifestation of minority resistance has been accepted by mass consumers, and, subsequently, how important it is to combat the blind acculturation of this self-care in corporate semiotics. The popularity of self-care in its bastardised form of escapism– the consumption of #selfcare media on sponsored Instagram lifestyle accounts, the interest in images of indulgence and relaxation and their reproduction– can still be recognised as an indication of significant systemic pressure. From another perspective, the reification and promotion of self-care, especially the fact that it is female-coded, makes the previously nonconformist focus on mental health and on the forgiving appreciation of self conditionally licit for women in societies that demand daily a thousand forms of labour.
The traction of this neutralised concept of self-care has guaranteed its reception and weaponisation by the curators of corporate culture. Many of us who are familiar with the self-care programs and reward schemes instituted by the HR departments of western-style, international, ‘modernised’ corporations are familiar also with their dual semiotics– first a particular form of representation and communication that grabs fistfuls of commercial yoga culture to promote ‘harmony with the self’, and second an accompanying narrative of entitlement to material reward.
The de-historicised language of commercialised self-care allows for an extensive flexibility of application, as a new pacifier protecting from systemic change. The recognition by companies of people’s eagerness for some sort of justified experience of happiness, or ownership, or control– the recognition of people’s unhappiness– has led both to a renewed emphasis on the ‘care’ provided by a company as a factor of hiring competition, and to the popular transformation of the conception of “self-care” from a radical act of the reassertion of individual control and relevance within an unjust system to an act of personal responsibility.
In a way, the term has come full circle. In the US, the African’s assumed inability take on the responsibility to care for and govern himself was used as an infantilising justification for slavery; later, it was used to critique Southern and Eastern European immigrants as inherently unfit for citizenship, and women as lacking the necessary faculties to vote. Black communities in the ‘70s and ‘80s took up the concept in defiance, asserting their right to self-preservation. Today, for all that self-love is associated with self-care, it has again become a gauge of personal responsibility– an indicator of prudent self-governance and a guarantor of satisfactory performance. Again, it has become an exercise in policing the exception.
For those of us entering the workforce after CEU, the recognition that this instrument for resistance has been co-opted to promote complacency towards the system and criticism of the self, to reverse the narrative and to blame the oppressed for their own oppression, is a valuable tool for combating it. Whether you plan on dismantling capitalism as part of your career or not, resist the utilisation of self-care in corporate narratives, and keep its history in mind!
