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Recovering #SelfCare for Intersectional Feminist Futures: Neoliberalism, Self-Care, and Whiteness in Hashtag Communities
- Shana MacDonald
- Brianna Wiens
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Description: In August 2013, Mikki Kendall, writer, speaker, and blogger, tweeted #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen in a moment of “hood feminist” frustration at the continued silencing of marginalized voices––specifically, Black voices–– by white mainstream feminism (Mikki Kendall 2020). Taking Kendall seriously, our presentation argues that one of many ways that white supremacy functions within digital culture (and within North American culture more broadly) is to obscure the realities of social inequity via neoliberal dictums for personal self- improvement and individualist calls to live our “best lives.” Now more than ever, #selfcare occupies a central place in our public discourse about how to manage our new mediated lived realities amidst a global pandemic. In this presentation, we critically analyze the largely white, neoliberal, heteronormative enactments of the self-care hashtag on Instagram and Twitter to highlight how it fails to point towards forms of self-care that explicitly address societal inequities. The current moment, including the global pandemic and BLM protests, has sparked stark reckonings with the types of systemic failures and excesses that brought us to this point; we argue that self-care needs to be politicized more broadly and distinguished from the more popular white neoliberal enactments of self-care. It is thus crucial to re-center BIMPOC positions on (self and other) caretaking to move into a queer feminist anti-racist collective politic that necessitates radical change (Charlene A. Carruthers 2018; Karma Chavez 2013). We propose to first analyze #selfcare as a space of #solidarity that privileges white upper-class heteronormative frameworks that benefit from BIMPOC oppression. Next, we look towards BIMPOC feminist principles of self-care and joy (Sara Ahmed 2010; Brittney Cooper 2018; Audre Lorde 1984) to decenter whiteness and take up a more intersectional feminist activist lens. We then highlight a series of Instagram accounts amplifying BIMPOC feminist self-care principles that intervene into prevailing white frameworks and, in doing so, hack the platform affordances of Instagram to model forms of action and offer onto-epistemological frameworks we need for the present.