It often feels like there is nothing new to say about the contradictory politics of self-care. Behold Decolonize Self-Care. It brings a new diagnosis and critique to the crowded intersection of the self-care hot takes while making recommendations on both the theoretical and structural level. It is replete with insight on what perspective and practice is needed to survive the capitalist and racist day. It is smart, urgent, and often laugh out loud funny.
-Sarah Sharma, Associate Professor and Director of the ICCIT at the University of Toronto and author of In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics
Decolonize Self-Care not only details how far self care has traveled from its starting point as a Black feminist survival tactic, but how deeply and pervasively it has been transformed into highly monetized and self-serving logics. Throughout this hard-hitting book, they unfurl all the ways the poison of #SelfCare has been threaded into a wide array of seemingly disparate markets and movements. When Spurgas and Meleo-Erwin apply their incisive critique across the products and services we often consume as feel-good and healthy, their facades crumble, revealing much darker and more dangerous motives and outcomes. But they also provide a salve, urging readers to take on the task of more deference and less defensiveness, more collective action and less credit-card driven indulgence, that is, their prescription is more care, less self.
–Laura Mauldin, Associate Professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, University of Connecticut
Decolonize Self-Care is a brisk and bracing dive into the colonial roots of contemporary wellness culture. Spurgas and Meleo-Erwin examine how the self-care industry continues primarily to benefit wealthy, white, western women in the global North, even as its proponents claim to have embraced new, inclusive, and social justice-oriented models of wellbeing. The authors make accessible complex concepts such as feminism, neoliberalism, and white supremacy in their analyses of how problematic notions of 'self-care' manifest in the examples of sexual enhancement, self-optimization, and diet.
–Colleen Derkatch, author of Why Wellness Sells
