SELF-CARE AS RESISTANCE: Healing through re-thinking ourselves and reality in atypical subjectivity

Abstract

The ideological framework of neoliberalism has become one of the most important structures through which society is organized. Neoliberalism has co-opted structures and narratives of self-care, adding dimensions of consumerism and furthering individualism. This neoliberal self-care lacks the resistant potentiality self-care can hold when conceptualized through a critical, feminist lens. More attention can and must be paid to projects of re-understanding and re-creating care and knowledge structures that seek to de-individualize and re-politicize the concept of caring under contemporary neoliberal doctrine. This thesis, furthering work previously done within feminism on care and resistance, re-conceptualizes the concept of self-care using the perspectives of atypical subjectivity, a position which allows for the production of alternative forms of care and resistance to oppressive systems. Specifically, this thesis poses the question: how can a re-conceptualization of self-care through atypical subjectivity construct self-care as resistance to neoliberalism?

Rooted in crip theory, mad studies and anti-psy studies, this thesis is a theoretical exploration of the interaction of neoliberal and atypical subjectivities, subject formation, Foucauldian active philosophy and self-care as resistance. It identifies and challenges structures of neoliberalism, specifically subject formation, outlines the co-optation of self-care through neoliberalism, and offers an intervention through an investigation into the resistant possibility of atypical subjectivity. Overall, this thesis seeks to posit a new framework in which self-care for atypical subjects is the re-examination of reality and one’s relationship to it. Through this fundamental questioning of categories, self-care becomes a mechanism through which to accept atypicalities and form community, embracing differences in the self and each other, and enacting resistance to oppressive power structures.