W3D2

 Both Kathy Davis’s “Feminist Body/politics as World Traveler: Translating Our Bodies, Ourselves” and Michelle Murphy’s “Unsettling care: Troubling transnational itineraries of care in feminist health practices” explore complications in feminist and collectivist approaches to care, with Davis writing that “OBOS validated women’s embodied experiences as a resource for challenging medical dogmas about women’s bodies and, consequently, as a strategy for personal and collective empowerment” (Davis, 224) and going on to analyze the neoliberal context for the book as “feminist export product” (Davis, 233). She illuminates OBOS’s historical positionality within the self-help framework of women’s empowerment and optimization. Davis writes that “In a context where the government cannot be counted on to meet the basic health care needs of all its citizens, the combination of self-help and consumer activism advocated by OBOS made perfect sense, providing a needed corrective to the US healthcare system and the ubiquitous commercialization of the female body” (Davis, 225). Even within collectivist settings, Murphy points out that these approaches have a tendency “to avoid addressing the ongoing, painful, and extensive forces of racism or colonialism that do not disappear with good intentions or by constructing spaces where such forces are not keenly felt by privileged subjects” (Murphy, 720). Self help and consumer activism are tools applicable to projects across a wide range of political or social interests, in every case reinforcing an individualist, neoliberal approach to whatever goal they are used in service of as they both ultimately responsibilize the individual agent for their own wellbeing (self-help) and community wellbeing (consumer activism) in a way that forecloses the possibility of collective care and collective action. The self-care/burnout model of wellness and illness evolves within this framework and is an incredibly effective capitalist strategy. Self-care is constantly being redefined, delegitimized, legitimized, bordered, and expanded. Explained to me at a convention for “low-income, high achieving” college students (Questbridge), self-care is the unwaged labor one performs in order to self-optimize and excel at the paid/valued/productive labor of school or work. This excellence is threatened by burnout, a stop on the road to depression, mental illness, and ultimately uselessness to society, should self-care not be implemented. It did not escape my notice at the time that self-care did not seem to be something that my wealthier college friends struggled with. Not only were their base needs already being met (in many cases via the paid labor of people like me), they didn’t feel the need to earn their place or prove themselves worthy by working themselves to exhaustion in the way that I and the other Questbridge scholars did. The idea of achieving one’s full potential is linked to all sorts of rhetoric as diverse as “proving the haters wrong”, “defying the odds'', and even modeling “black excellence.” For low-income college students, especially at prestigious universities, a theoretical and individualized future is constructed in which, after accomplishing all this which seemed impossible before Yale’s stamp of approval, they might also achieve some version of the American Dream but only if they are willing to differentiate themselves from their families and communities. The sanitized sensorium of the Ivy League promises great rewards to those who both conform and excel. First-generation, low-income students are expected to outperform their privileged peers despite systemic barriers within the university. They are dehumanized by their status as investments, wholly reliant on the university’s continued “generosity”, until they can offer their return. There is no room for error in their work, as in many cases food and housing are supplied directly by the university and are uncertain in its absence. Under these conditions, it becomes necessary for FGLI students to undertake the work of optimization, attempting to find shortcuts in the unpaid care work necessary to their survival and acceptance to avoid sacrificing their productivity. These shortcuts are more often than not, products marketed to teens and young adults which offer fast fixes to the individual impacts of systemic burdens. Within this system, we work to earn money which we then spend on our maintenance and improvement so that we can continue to work and our value does not decline. At the same time, we are blamed for our financial instability, as in the now memed millennial’s dilemma of choosing between a mortgage and an avocado toast. The dichotomization of self care and self indulgence dates back to Audre Lorde’s 1988 “A Burst of Light” from which it is oft quoted that “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare” (Lorde). As the dominant conceptualization of self-care has shifted from an effort at preservation to one of optimization, it has come to bear less resemblance to warfare and is barely legible as a form of resistance. Perhaps the most legitimized form of self care is therapy, with its institutional backing and historical association with white and western patriarchy. Feminist projects to accessibilize or even transform therapy in order to spread its benefits to a wider audience are hindered by this history and the limits that it places on imagining alternative modes. One such project was attempted at Yale by Laurie Santos and Tracy George, the latter of whom referred to pandemic quarantine as an “involuntary meditation retreat” (Konversai). In her tenure at Silliman College she spoke often of her desire to create a wellness community that she hoped would someday supplant individual therapy for many Yale students. Although this approach has been largely ineffective in that it generalizes the needs of a diverse population and failed to consider the access needs of many students, I believe that it was ultimately flawed in that it attempted to leverage community care into individual empowerment. When happiness, or what feels good (Murphy, 717- 719) is privileged above honesty and what does good, we end up being left with just a room full of beanbags and free stickers. The difference in positionality and ideology between figures like George and "Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet," Audre Lorde. Lorde was speaking on the strategies necessary for splitting her energies between a battle with cancer and a lifelong fight against oppression. Neoliberal and capitalist interventions into this territory largely led by wealthy white women have drawn the line between legitimate self care and reckless self indulgence. A classed split between self care and community care dates back, at least, to the Industrial Revolution. Contrasting, for instance, the British Victorian practice of drinking tea (notably, a colonized commodity) in small, carefully selected groups of Upper class citizens, or in isolation, and the practice of imbibing local beers, ciders, and liquors in large numbers at public pubs among the working class. The difference between these two approaches to “relaxation” are tied inexorably to colonial projects of constructing difference, and painted even white British subjects as “uncivilized” should they engage in these “lower class” customs. In the construction of one activity as legitimate and one as illegitimate, one is also classed as stuffy and one as enjoyable, or even free. Consider for example the below-deck scene in the movie Titanic in which the upper class heroine loses all inhibitions, and appears “happy” for the first time in the film. Depictions of working class and racialized subjects as joyful and free spirited are deeply problematic in that they tend to erase the traumatic harm caused by oppressive hegemonies and carry with them connotations of blissful ignorance. Partying is not self care but vagina steaming is??? I would like to offer an alternative to the neoliberal imperative to “treat yo’ self.” The question of whether millennials deserve to have that Starbucks coffee or nine dollar avocado toast obscures acts of pleasure which are simultaneously acts of resistance, and implies that an activist's only options are participating in capitalist self care or succumbing to burn out. Kathleen Newman-Bremang wrote in article for Refinery29 this past May,“I’m so fucking TIRED of the onus being put on Black people to ‘find a way to heal’... This is a time when the concept of self-care is rendered essentially useless without community care, this is not the kind of thing that *can* be survived alone, and it is also the kind of thing that is all the more devastating in isolation.” (Newman-Bremang). For people from outsider or marginalized groups, the communities which we have been taught are holding us back, or preventing our ascent to middle class bliss (in my experience as FGLI Yale student) with their supposed ignorance, recklessness, and inability to take care of themselves, are in fact made up of our true allies and our traditions of communal celebration which have been so maligned are in fact sites of resistance, where it is needed most. Multinational punk band Gogol Bordello wrote in their 2005 song, “Oh No” that “Sometimes when facing common trouble / When whole town is screwed / We become actually human / Act like Prometheus would / Suddenly there is more humor / And a party tabor style / People ringing one another / "Yo man, how was your blackout?" / Suddenly there is more music / Made with the buckets in the park / Girls are dancing with the flashlights / I got only one guitar / And you see brothers and sisters / All engaged in sport of help / Making merry out of nothing / Like in refugee camp” (Gogol Bordello, “Oh No”). The song’s title comes from the singers refrain that “Oh yeah, oh no, it doesn't have to be so / It is possible any time anywhere / Even without any dough / Oh yeah, oh no, it doesn't have to be so / The forces of the creative mind are unstoppable” (Gogol Bordello, “Oh No”). The song, which I’ve included a link to in the bibliography, goes on in its second verse to address many of the same challenges that capitalist interventions pose to this type of community engagement that I hope I have illustrated here. The work that proponents of self care have done to delegitimize community care is directly applied to the hierarchization of bodies, pleasures, sexes, and genders that precludes both collective resistance and transnational stranger intimacies.