Mindfulness under neoliberal governmentality: critiquing the operation of biopower in corporate mindfulness and constructing queer alternatives

Abstract

At the heart of many mindfulness critiques is essentially a critique of how mindfulness has been rebranded to promote neoliberal governmentality and produce neoliberal subjects. Most critics of corporate mindfulness don’t argue that teaching mindfulness in a corporate setting is a problem in itself – they are more specifically critiquing the broader notion of corporate mindfulness, as a management tool whose various entanglements with neoliberal governmentality subordinate mindfulness practitioners to larger systemic issues related to how stress is generated and how mindfulness is used to alleviate the symptoms, rather than systemic sources of stress. In this paper, I will argue that mindfulness programs provide effective regulatory mechanisms for biopower to extend neoliberal logics of control to internal conditioning processes, and I will articulate ways in which one might alternatively conceive and practice mindfulness not only to resist neoliberal governmentality, but also to affirm the lives that it subjugates.

Keywords:

• Mindfulness
• neoliberal governmentality
• well-being
• resilience
• engagement
• queer theory