“‘taking care of yourself is the most important thing’: Prefigurative Political Lessons of Women’s Self-Care.”

This article explores feminist interpretations of “self-care” during the COVID-19 pandemic by looking specifically at self-care in a communal context. I began by analyzing how mainstream ideas of self-care are adopted by feminists during 2020. I then use data from ten months of digital ethnographic methods of online groups wherein self-care is central to the group’s mission. I observe a form of self-care: prefigurative self-care, a strategy that combines a set of political ideologies and discourses to prefigure online spaces where members question how self-work is necessary to challenge social hierarchies and also builds networks of care. To counter hegemonic understandings of self-care as purely consumer practices, I find that prefigurative self-care groups create an idealized self-care that attempts to reconfigure racial hierarchies, articulates the importance of embodied needs, and identifies community and interdependence as defining features of self-care.

Forthcoming in Feminist Studies.