In 2017, staff writer for The New Yorker Jia Tolentino wrote, “The Year That Skin Care Became a Coping Mechanism”. She describes her personal thinking process after learning of the increasing price of skincare products, essential in a culture where visible aging is perceived as negative and unwelcome. Yes, of course, there is importance in taking care of yourself, but the main issue arises with this grave commodification of self-care; self-care synonymized with financial investment.
No longer is a 5-step skincare routine a luxury, but an expectation to maintain beauty and consequently, value. Tolentino frequently references the late cultural critic Susan Sontag and her thoughts on aging in The Double Standard of Aging. A woman’s social value is directly related to her attractiveness and women are primarily seen as most attractive in their youth. There are generally only two (simplified) outcomes to a woman’s life: be married with a happy family and children or become the dreaded undesirable spinster. Traditionally speaking, reproduction is the ultimate end goal and marker for success in a woman’s life. As Sontag describes it, “for most women, aging means a humiliating process of gradual sexual disqualification” and thus, to obtain success via reproduction, skincare and all other forms of physical maintenance become paramount to social desirability [2 p. 20]. These practices also seek to delay or postpone aging entirely, in order to extend the period of time a woman is valuable. Tolentino goes further to say that, in the epoch of time we exist, skincare is hopeful. The increasing threats of climate change, widespread war and political instability threaten the existence of a future at all, so maybe skincare functions as wishful thinking in practice. Tolentino ponders this, “I wonder if women my age are less afraid of looking older than we are of the possibility that there will be no functional world to look old in”.
This calls to memory Sontag’s contemporary, Audre Lorde, and the origins of self-care. Self-care arose in the 1980s through Black feminists, Lorde included in this. In 1988, she wrote perhaps the most famous quote regarding self-care, “caring for myself is not an act of self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare” [3]. It’s important to note the ways this quote has been misconstrued. Lorde, a Black lesbian feminist wrote this a few years prior to her death following an almost 15-year battle with cancer. Her political resistance came from the mere act of caring for herself in a world set on devaluing her, in a slowly dying body. The modern view of self-care misunderstands Lorde’s intentions, it is not radical to care for ourselves through overconsumption of product, which furthers the same capitalist structures that enable our everyday dread.
Self-care and the industry spawned by it are permeated by neoliberal individualism. As a quick primer, neoliberalism as a successor to classical liberalism widely upholds the same key tenets. Liberalism advocates for individual economic agency and condemns government interference with such. The government is not to interfere, and markets will self-regulate. Neoliberalism applies this to a global scale, with concepts such as free trade and deregulated markets. While vastly economic in its infancy, liberalism and consequently neoliberalism have expanded much beyond this [4]. Neoliberalism advocates for self-governance, also applying to the idea that a person is responsible for their own happiness. Per neoliberalism, the ultimate purpose of an individual is to be seen as a commodity and profitable, and individual health and well-being are important only to serve this dogma [5]. Combined with Sontag’s thoughts on aging, and the required financial stability to invest in a lengthy care routine, this begins to outline the inherent issues of an industry centred around caring for the self, and its capitalistic undertones.
So how can we practice care in ways that don’t implicate us in larger, predatory systems? This is especially relevant in a world that continues to struggle through a pandemic and its ramifications. Several scholars and activists have emphasized the importance of collective care and placing care at the forefront of our lives. In The Care Manifesto, the authors known jointly as The Care Collective, describe care as the personal and common ability to create a world that provides the political, social, material and emotional parameters to allow people, animals and the planet itself to thrive [6]. Activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha prompts us to think about what this means for disabled and sick, “What does it mean to shift our ideas of access and care (whether it’s disability, childcare, economic access, or many more) from an individual chore, an unfortunate cost of having an unfortunate body, to a collective responsibility that’s maybe even deeply joyful?” [7].
As praxis, collective care means affordable childcare, safe access to reproductive health clinics, harm-reduction resources for substance abuse, public housing and so much more. It means free vaccine clinics, mental health days, and opening ourselves to the idea of dependency. We are all dependent on each other, as much as neoliberal ideology wants us to refuse it. Our survival and success as communities have always been reliant on others. A politic of care recognizes this and suggests we do the work to stop failing at looking after each other.
I don’t mean to dismiss any ideas of caring for ourselves individually. We cannot practice collective care and activism without maintaining our own well-being. But I encourage us all to consider how we engage with care and remember that perhaps, the most radical act we can commit to is caring for others.
References
[1] Tolentino J. The Year That Skin Care Became a Coping Mechanism. New Yorker 2017.
[2] Sontag S. The Double Standard of Aging, Routledge; 1997.
[3] Lorde A, Sanchez S. A Burst of Light. A Burst of Light and Other Essays, New York: Dover Publications; 2017.
[4] Steger MB, Roy RK. What’s ‘neo’ about liberalism? In: Steger MB, Roy RK, editors. Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction. 1st ed., Oxford University Press; 2010. https://doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780199560516.003.0001.
[5] Delaney B. We need to move on from self-care to something that cannot be captured by capitalism. The Guardian 2020.
[6] Chatzidakis A, Hakim J, Littler J, Rottenberg C, Segal L. The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence. Verso; 2020.
[7] Piepzna-Samarasinha LL. Care Webs: Experiments in Creating Collective Access. Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press; 2018.