Article:

Living whose best life? An intersectional feminist interrogation of postfeminist #solidarity in #selfcare

This article argues that one of the many ways that white supremacy functions within digital culture is to obscure the realities of social inequity via neoliberal dictums for self-improvement and individ-ualist calls to live our ‘best lives’. For decades Black feminists have been advocating for self-care as preservation and community building. This article highlights the need for self-care to return to its roots in Black feminism and to distinguish itself from popular feminist enactments of self-care. To do so, we critically analyse ex-amples of postfeminist enactments of #selfcare on Instagram to highlight how they exacerbate societal inequities. We first explore the relationship between #selfcare and Instagram itself, outlining the effects of Instagram’s affordances on its users to demonstrate how both users and the platform shape each other. Next, we inter-rogate #selfcare as a space of #solidarity, arguing that current itera-tions privilege white upper-class frameworks that benefit from various oppressions. Last, we closely analyse The Nap Ministry, an Instagram account that highlights Black feminist self-care princi-ples that intervene into prevailing white frameworks and, in doing so, co-opts the platform affordances of Instagram to model forms of action and offer frameworks we need for the present. In sum, this article suggests that genuine #solidarity through #selfcare must decenter whiteness and take up a more intersectional feminist lens.