Radical self-care and the lived contradictions of gender in feminist activism

Care has become one of the foundational concepts of feminist democratic theory. In conjunction with the feminist project of foregrounding the labor of care required to sustain life, and the ethos of care as a democratic principle of living together, care is also increasingly discussed as a political project of the self. Self-care, too, is constructed as an activist tool, and as an explicit political project. This paper examines representations of and discussions on radical self-care on Instagram. Based on critical visual analyses of 310 images and their captions and comments posted with the hashtag #radicalselfcare, we analyse how radical self-care is understood and visually portrayed, what constitutes ‘radical’ in the representations of self-care, and how the political, selfhood and democracy are constructed in this context. We identify two forms of radical self-care: self-care as a form of and prerequisite for political activism, drawing from the Black feminist tradition of self-care as political warfare in an oppressive society, and radical self-care as an individualized practice aimed at self-optimisation in the competitive structures of capitalism. While the former construes radical self-care as a collective practice geared towards resisting intersectional dynamics of social oppression through building and sustaining political communities, the latter exemplifies a lived contradiction between the ideal of a self-sustaining “modern cowgirl”, and the requirement of caring femininity. This form of radical self-care balances on the tightrope between the ghost of the historical figure of the “selfish feminist”, reminding the activists of the inescapable female duty of care, and the ideal, neo-liberal subject, which pathologizes dependency and vulnerability. We argue that these two forms of radical self-care exemplify lived contradictions of gender in feminist activism and ways of responding to them. Radical self-care is a highly gendered field and serves as a site in which contradictory cultural ideals and pressures of femininity are grappled with. The two diverging forms of radical self-care demonstrate opposing solutions to the lived contradiction between the duty to care, and the requirement to self-sustain. Resultingly, they are also rooted in and gesture towards diverging visions of democracy. We conclude by suggesting that radical self-care sheds light on a sense of powerlessness and futurelessness, and a perplexity about ways of pursuing effective political change.