Abstract
The dominant answer to popular calls for self care in everyday discourse is a thriving eleven billion dollar industry. The self care economy encompasses workplace wellness programs, consumer goods and services, and entrepreneurship. This infrastructure revolves around commercial consumers and providers and advances through conceptions of health and well-being centered on individuals.
Despite their prevalence, the concept and provision of self care have gone underexamined in legal critiques of societal underinvestment in care. This Article fills this gap by exploring the social construction of the dominant contemporary conception of self care in the United States, one that continues to be construed within a solely individualized framework. Within this model, individuals’ encounters with care appear to arise in a vacuum— both in how care needs emerge and how care needs are addressed.
This Article focuses on self care ideology’s intersection with work. The workplace has come to play an important role in shaping and producing the dominant paradigm of self care. Workplaces commonly offer what are intended as self care supports to workers. The economic sector also includes workplaces constituting the “care” industry supporting self care. When focused on work, we see that care needs individuals experience do not arise uniquely in reference to the self but arise substantially from relational dynamics. Conversely, care provision for the self relies on a range of relationships. Importantly, relationships driving self care need and provision are shaped by power dynamics rooted in racial, gender, and economic inequality.
These insights point toward legal and policy reform that more directly addresses the underlying care needs of workers (both those who work in “care” industries and those who do not), instead of relying on ideology and practices focused solely on individuals engaging in “self” remedy. Mainstreamed concepts of self care serve as a paradigm example of a societal tendency to place responsibility of care on the individual. The discourse of self care transforms the labor and responsibility of addressing society-wide risk into an act of individual nurture. When focused on the workplace, we see the role that the predominant model of self care plays in perpetuating workplace and workforce inequalities and rendering invisible racial, gender, and economic inequalities. A better way to help workers would be to support their needs directly, by addressing relational dynamics in the workplace and providing broader supports for worker care.