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ABSTRACT
Moving between the 2015 elections, Covid-19 and the sustained social justice protests in the United States in this essay, I question where and how the pursuit of joy, remedies for boredom and practices of self-care relate to the necropolitical social hierarchies in the United States. In spite of popular declarations that the virus is ‘the great equalizer’, there is considerable evidence that Covid-19 devastates along established systems of power, rights and values that organize the cultural practices of the everyday. This is especially visible in those who seek self-care from the anxieties of the pandemic, and how and why they seek such care. Driven by a combination of guilt and privilege, along with a deliberate misreading of Audre Lorde's notion of self-care as an act of political warfare, these words and their corresponding practices animate a hubristic right to the good life even at the end of capitalism. Given this, I ask how in the midst of mutating pathological social and political conditions and their corresponding discomforts, self-care and the search for joy have become imbricated in narratives of progressive politics.
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This Special Issue article has been comprehensively reviewed by the Special Issue editors, Associate Professor Ted Striphas and Professor John Nguyet Erni.
Notes
1 Bourdieu (Citation2002) defines habitus as ‘a system of dispositions, that is of permanent manners of being, seeing, acting and thinking, or a system of long-lasting (rather than permanent) schemes or schemata or structures of perception, conception and action’. While habitus has gone out of fashion in academia, I find Bourdieu's work useful here because of the way he is attentive to the temporality of practices and schemata in both physical and social spaces.
2 Harris (Citation2017) notes that ‘The week after the election, Americans Googled the term almost twice as often as they ever had in years past’.
3 I say ‘seemingly’ here because to assume that her election was predetermined also speaks directly to the unspoken privileges that even the more progressive amongst us engage in. Essentially, to not be prepared for the eventual outcome of that election in 2016 indicates a level of faith in the existing system that the more vulnerable amongst us, from experience, do not have.
5 Political and social life in the United States consistently focuses on single issues rather than addressing them as intersecting concerns. For example, we can focus on race or sexism, but not both.
7 As I write this, in mid-2020, the unemployment rate is at 11.1% (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf).
8 While there is no space here to go into its longer history, self-care as healthcare was popularized starting in 1950s by the Black Panther movement. In Beyond Berets: The Black Panthers as Health Activist (Citation2016). Mary T. CitationBassett writes that the Black Panther’s ‘ … vision hewed closely to the fundamentally radical idea that achieving health for all demands a more just and equitable world’ (1741).
9 BLM uses the hashtag #blacklivesmatter as a geotag of sorts to communicate with activists on the ground, and to share information about vital care in the spaces they are protesting in.
10 Prior to, and since his election, the 45th president's policies have most negatively impacted the most vulnerable populations in this country, including women, people of colour, and the poor.
11 In my college level classrooms, ‘hard work’ is always a response I get when I ask how one becomes wealthy in the United States. The correct answer, which is that one must inherit wealth in order to be rich, always seems to surprise students.
12 She also recommends Hydrochlorine baths that have been widely refuted as ineffective by medical practitioners.
13 She writes: Not all of the treatments I talk about here are for everyone, but we can all benefit from eating well and keeping our immunity up. ‘Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that’, said Martin Luther King Jr. And, as our trusted New York governor said, ‘Love wins’. https://thepuristonline.com/2020/04/cristina-cuomo-corona-protocol-week-3/
14 Certainly to imagine that this election – framed by white middle and upper-middle class notions of ‘electability’ and trickle-down policies – is anything more than middle-class self-care, is hubris.
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Notes on contributors
Kumarini Silva
Kumarini Silva is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Her research is at the intersection of identity, politics, post-colonial studies, cultural studies and popular culture. She is the author of Brown Threat: Identification in the Security State (2016) and co-editor of Feminist Erasures: Challenging Backlash Culture (2015) and of Migration, Identity, and Belonging: Defining Borders and Boundaries of the Homeland (2020). Her current research looks at how affective relationships, especially calls to and of love, animate regulatory practices that are deeply cruel and alienating.