The affirmative culture of healthy self-care: A feminist critique of the good health imperative

Abstract

Feminist critiques highlight how neoliberal ideologies withdraw attention from the social and the political toward the cult of individual hard work, thereby obscuring oppression and economic disenfranchisement as merely matters for individuals to “overcome” with hard work. Individuals should see their health as a matter of personal responsibility making disability, class, and gender merely private matters to attend to with proper healthy self-care. In this paper, I expand upon feminist philosophy to think about healthy self-care as requiring a delayed body fantasy and to ask if we might see healthy self-care like a morally neutral hobby rather than a mark of moral and social goodness.