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.