Green/blue wellbeing is increasingly a focus of mental and physical healthcare in the United Kingdom, with green/blue space “prescribing” touted as providing a range of benefits. Attempts to explore the “how” and “why” of potential mental health improvements through these activities to date are primarily quantitative, and/or utilize medical/individualized models. Such approaches are situated within and can reinscribe a humanist, extractivist, one-way relationship with the natural world. Here, we draw on ecofeminist approaches to care to explore findings from our fieldwork with two wild swimming communities in Scotland, enabling us to consider human–nature interactions as relational. The wild swimming focus groups presented a complex picture in which the mental health benefits of swimming are entangled with relationships between group members, and embodied, sensory experiences of and relationships with blue spaces. By conceptualizing these groups as “ecologies of care,” we seek to embrace that intricacy, considering how wild swimming is a political act engaged with through deviant bodies or in deviant temporal/weather conditions, and how care is engendered through mutuality, space, and cold water. In conjunction with this complexity, the emergent nature of these groups has transformative implications for futurity, justice-to-come, and hyper-local ways of living within and alongside blue spaces.

This paper explores the political significance of intuitive eating as a self-care practice in the context of healing from anorexia and bulimia. Feminist philosophers have described how eating disorders emerge in socio-cultural contexts marked by an idealization of thinness, especially in women. Besides this, philosophers and sociologists have spoken about the connections between fatphobia, diet culture, racism, and sexism. Given these claims, I will argue that healing from these disorders can be framed as acts of political resistance. First, I present the notion of self-care and touch on its evolution from an ethical to a political ideal. Second, I describe the socio-cultural origins of the thinness ideal and of fatphobia to show they fuel eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia. Third, I introduce Kate Manne’s conception of “bodily imperatives” and describe Audre Lorde’s framing of her struggles with cancer as acts of political resistance. This discussion supports the claim that the self-care practices anorectics and bulimics engage in to recover from disordered eating can be political in nature. Fourth, I entertain and respond to three objections to my view. I conclude that healing from disordered eating is not merely an individual act, but one full of political potential.

A despairing agent might object to climate obligations by framing them as too demanding to be morally required because they give rise to burdensome consequences of despair, like depression. This objection can be refuted on the grounds that it is morally wrong. However, when it is understood as symptomatic of moral injury, an alternative response prioritizing moral repair is illuminated. I consider how the virtue of epistemic humility can promote tasks for repair, like attentiveness to symptoms of moral injury. I see this virtue as a basis for an active form of care for others and the self that resists temptations to refer to this objection.

Feminist theorists have critiqued the twenty-first-century turn towards self-care as neoliberal, arguing that personal wellness masks the welfare state’s destruction. I clarify an ambiguity in the argument against self-care’s purported neoliberalism, distinguishing three strands of critique: that self-care is too individual, that self-care is too commercial, and that self-care involves a shift in who is responsible for the reproduction of subjects, from the state to the individual. It is in the Foucauldian critique of self-care as responsibilizing that arguments against self-care’s purported neoliberalism are sharpest. Yet, care for the self is more ambivalent than these arguments admit. Self-care has remained important to Black feminists, feminist scholars of disability, and decolonial feminists, including many explicitly critical of neoliberalism. Attending to the particular contexts from which calls for self-care emerge demonstrate how self-care is compatible with a critique of neoliberalism and can serve as a critique of neoliberalism itself. Neoliberalism is borne disproportionately by Black women, disabled people, and the Indigenous. Members of these groups have historical reasons to distrust the state’s claim to care. They have also been tasked with caring for others instead of for themselves. Finally, care for the self can articulate a refusal of optimization that neoliberalism demands.

In this musing, I reflect on care ethics as they relate to the material contours of everyday life. Drawing on my own queercrip life writing, I explore my experiences of participating in virtual disability support groups. Calling these meetings crip care assemblages, I note how ethical commitments, norms, and expectations relate to the material specifics in different support group configurations. In examining these configurations, I consider how access and participation are emergent phenomena, grounded in each entangled encounter, and the implications of this contingency for organizing collective care practices.

In this paper I theorize a form of epistemic resistance rooted in Audre Lorde’s notion of self-care. I do this by developing an undertheorized concept in Miranda Fricker’s work, hermeneutical rebellion, proposing a model of epistemic self-care that can cultivate the capacities needed to resist oppressive narratives and social imaginaries acting on one’s identity. Considering breast cancer survivor narratives as a case study, I analyze the identity power wielded by the dominant narrative (e.g. white, cis, heteronormative conceptions of femininity), arguing that survivors are subject to hermeneutical injustice that kettles them into an understanding of themselves which perpetuates systems of oppression. Engaging Katharine Jenkins’s account of gender identity, I show how an individual’s efforts to rebel against this dominant narrative will be insufficient to overcome identity harms, as she will be defining herself in relation to the same constructions she is rebelling against. I argue that a different type of rebellion is needed—one capable of loosening the grip of identity power on one’s sense of self. Drawing from Lorde’s experience as well as my own, ultimately I reframe the dominant narrative as absurd and introduce Donna Haraway’s cyborg myth as a model for the kind of alternative conceptual resource that can make this rebellion possible.

In this paper, we analyze the potential harms of everyday self-help discourse, particularly in contexts of systemic oppression. After analyzing the core principles of self-help, such as the power of positive thinking, eliminating negative thinking, gratitude, self-knowledge for self-improvement, and individual choice and responsibility, we argue that self-help discourse is likely to perpetuate different forms of harm in conditions of oppression. First, we argue that, when used in contexts of systemic oppression, self-help discourse contributes to victim-blaming. Secondly, we highlight that the harms of self-help discourse include epistemic and affective dimensions. On the epistemic front, self-help discourse carries epistemic risks, including testimonial smothering and hermeneutical injustice, by discouraging the expression of certain perspectives and lived experiences. On the affective front, self-help discourse reinforces oppression by adding emotional burdens to the oppressed, dismissing their emotional experiences, and imposing the emotional norms of the dominant group. Finally, we revisit the principles of self-help, and show how they contribute to the highlighted harms, particularly by reinforcing victim-blaming, and epistemic and affective forms of injustice.

Addicts, an already vulnerable population, can be made worse off by certain kinds of popular and well-intentioned research programs and beliefs about addiction, agency, and responsibility. Perspectives of backwards-facing responsibility that focus on blameworthiness and liability highlight the injustices that addicts have faced. Likewise, the disease model of addiction, pursued as an alternative to the stigmatization and moralization of the choice model, takes responsibility away from the addict. However, each of these fails to help the addict to recover or to care for herself. If anything, embracing these perspectives and models can rob addicts of agency and lead them to further suffering. Drawing on feminist philosophy, this paper shows there is good evidence for us to reconsider those models and perspectives, and instead ask what kind of understandings about addiction aid in fostering agency and recovery.

This article introduces the part-time cyborg as a Black feminist framework for navigating and resisting the demands of visibility, labor, and surveillance in digital and institutional spaces. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s cyborg theory and Black feminist thought, the part-time cyborg reclaims rest and refusal as strategies for survival and defiance. The article argues that mundane authoritarianism operates through small, everyday demands that normalize compliance, particularly for Black women, whose bodies have long been sites of scrutiny and control. By turning off a camera or withdrawing from hypervisibility, the part-time cyborg disrupts these systems, asserting autonomy in the face of extractive logics. In an era of intensifying surveillance and control, these micro-resistances are vital tools for imagining and building more just and equitable futures.

In this essay, I argue that for women, rather than a flaw to be suppressed, embracing anger is a vital act of self-care and resilience. While philosophical traditions often dismiss women’s anger as irrational, I argue that it is a legitimate response to injustice and a necessary tool for reclaiming agency. I begin by examining how traditions from the Stoics to Aristotle have framed anger as an impediment to reason. This framing is often used to position women’s anger as evidence of a weak or shameful state. I then argue that these social constraints are not universal; specifically, Black women must navigate the angry Black woman stereotype, which treats their expressions of anger as threatening or excessive. Drawing on my own history and the cultural evolution of “the angry woman” in the media, I next highlight that women become experts at controlling anger because the alternative is being labeled emotional or facing physical danger. I conclude by arguing that caring for oneself does not mean overcoming anger but rather embracing it as a source of strength. Seen as such, anger, then, becomes a form of self-respect and a liberating act of reclaiming.

Care work can be extremely demanding, as this musing illustrates with an extended feminist case study of long and grinding care work. Yet it is essential work that is paradoxically both undervalued and fundamental to the continuation of society. Much ink has been spilled on what society and the state owe to those who render care. Here, I interrogate the limits of the care worker’s duty to provide care under a system that is oppressive to care workers because it does not provide what is owed, and relies on a logic of depletion. Self-care can justify saying “no” to care work as a way of resisting the logic of depletion, but in a non-ideal world, this refusal isn’t open to everyone. And who it is open to distressingly tracks and levies both socio-economic oppression and the very same system that devalues care work in the first place.

This paper critiques self-help literature for promoting personal boundaries while neglecting the value of boundary ambiguity, which is essential to care relations. Acknowledging the sufferings that undergird the term “boundary issues,” it reframes the cause of such experiences through Irigaray’s theory of gendered individuation. It argues that sexism produces structural obstacles against women’s ability to own their desires, and boundary-setting remains an inadequate solution because it is modeled after a masculine image of individuality. It draws on Irigaray’s concept of place-making to offer an alternative solution that does not devalue temporary boundary ambiguities.

This paper explores a dilemma often faced by marginalized groups: how to cope with oppression when doing so necessitates a choice between safeguarding immediate personal well-being and fighting for structural change. While mainstream conceptions of coping take it to be an individual-level phenomenon aimed at maintaining/restoring personal well-being through emotion regulation processes, a recent plea in psychology calls for the “decolonization” of coping, such that collective efforts aimed at liberatory change be construed as genuine instances of coping as well. We provide the first philosophical treatment of “decolonial coping” and assess its merits and drawbacks as compared to mainstream coping. Our focus on coping double binds contributes to the philosophical literature on double binds by broadening the range of scenarios that can plausibly be understood as instances of double binds and the normative analysis of the costs associated with each horn of the dilemma and with the double bind itself. We identify the affective injustice of apt ambivalence, thereby also addressing for the first time the relation between double binds and affective injustice.

This article examines the relational self-care practices of migrant Chinese women working as massage workers in the United States (hereinafter referred to as Chinese massage workers). Threading both the bodily and the intimate, Chinese massage workers offer care and relaxation for their clients through the modality of touch and quiet comfort. A wealth of scholarly work highlights the complexities of migrant massage workers’ daily lives and their paid labor of care. Thus far, the study of migrant massage workers focuses mainly on their romantic, familial, and work relationships. Little is known about the relational self-care practices that migrant massage workers engage in. Drawing on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article examines the practice of Chinese massage workers caring for one another through the intellectual genealogy of self-care in Black feminist scholarship. Through an examination of relational self-care performed by and for Chinese massage workers, this article shifts the focus from analyzing the expected performances of care-giving by migrant women massage workers within the economy of racial capitalism to a reconceptualization of self-care as a relational practice.

It is notable that self-care has entered mainstream discourse alongside the concept of a “care crisis”: an alarming breakdown on the terrain of life-making that materialist feminists term social reproduction. Beyond the opportunism of the commodified wellness industry, this coupling serves as a reminder of the inextricable relation between the personal and the political when it comes to the politics of care. A politics of self-care removed from these crisis conditions is one of vacuous individualism at best. At the same time, recent Marxist feminist attempts to address social reproductive crises of care through an expanded class and labor frame risk depoliticizing the lived experience and embodied transformation so fundamental to feminist and intersectional knowledge and organizing. Bringing the lens of social reproduction together with radical self-care literature rooted in the work of Audre Lorde and Sara Ahmed, this article instead claims that care of self and community and the social reproduction of struggles are inseparable. I conclude by discussing peer-to-peer strategies developed by care workers and sex workers, the underappreciated role of such “counter-normative” care in sustaining broader social movements, and the political limits of labor, even for many reproductive workers themselves.

This piece expresses an anger and frustration with the limits of modern European philosophy in relation to the spiritual. I question what theoretical comfort or liberatory potential can be provided by postmodernism, especially within feminist philosophy, in times of great violence and insecurity. I explore how the knower/known dichotomy places some researchers in a dual, sometimes contradictory, epistemological position as a ripple effect of the coloniality of knowledge. Ultimately, I ask what price we pay for knowledges that are ignored or dismissed in order to maintain the illusion of secular reason and the hegemony of European thought.