A Softer, Gentler Neoliberalism? Self-Help Feminism, Alternative Medicine, and the White Feminization of the Marketplace

• In Event: 3129 - Section on Medical Sociology Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 7. Complementary and Alternative Medicine

Abstract

Recently, self-improvement and self-care practices and products—including those labeled “alternative,” “homeopathic,” or “Eastern,” and many of which are marketed by and targeted to women—have become widely attainable in the Global North. In this paper, I analyze data gathered from message boards, blogs, and websites that describe these feminized self-help technologies, including mindfulness-based sex therapy, orgasmic meditation, women’s sexual empowerment through the co-optation of a variety of non-Western modalities, and other self-improvement techniques. I argue that these technologies constitute, perpetuate, and depend upon never-ending cycles of trauma and recovery under late capitalism, as well as the marketability of the “sacred” and the “feminine.” Women, no longer relegated to the private domestic sphere, and now viable entrepreneurs and consumers in their own right, participate in the creation and sustainment of this new marketplace, as they seek to recover from traumas that are endemic to late capitalism—by using technologies produced within this very same capitalist regime in order to recover. This process requires endless (re-)traumatization and (re-)recovery, and I highlight how neoliberal capitalism depends upon this trauma/recovery cycle. I also draw attention to the way that late capitalism itself is changing under this self-help/self-improvement regime, and I attend to how this marketplace is increasingly driven by and catered to white, upper-class women—which is ironic, given that the use of DIY medicine as an antidote to the obstruction of adequate treatment by institutional allopathic medicine has its origins often in working class, queer, and women of color communities. Thus, sociopolitical implications in terms of race, gender, class, and sexuality are discussed.

Authors

• Alyson K. Spurgas, Trinity College

• Zoe C. Meleo-Erwin, William Paterson University