Self-care as resistance : Lorde, Foucault, and playfulness

Summary, in English

Self-care has emerged as a critical practice of resistance in the current era of far-right resurgence. Building particularly on Audre Lorde’s insights, scholars, activists, and cultural workers conceptualize self-care as an act of political defiance and a strategy of collective survival. This article brings three different views of self-care into conversation. Beginning with Lorde's vision and contrasting it with Michel Foucault's ethics of the self, I show that both thinkers illuminate political dimensions of care that have long resonated in queer and feminist thought. Lorde emphasizes self-care as survival and solidarity; Foucault foregrounds non-domination and the cultivation of freedom. Both confront the paradoxical relationship between withdrawal and engagement, solitude and community, availability and self-knowledge – not as problems to be solved but as constitutive ambiguities of radical politics. Building on these insights, I propose a third approach: self-care as playfulness. This approach foregrounds moments of forgetting oneself – of ‘being no one’ temporarily – while sustaining mutual recognition and responsibility for justice. Together, these three approaches reveal how the political significance of self-care crystallizes not in clarity or resolution but in the capacity to affirm and inhabit ambiguity as part of a reflective, engaged way of being in the world.

• Författare: Markus Holdo
• Avdelning/ar: Statsvetenskapliga institutionen
• Publiceringsår: 2025
• Språk: Engelska
• Publikation/Tidskrift/Serie: Feminist Theory
• Länkar: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/14647001251398021
• Dokumenttyp: Artikel i tidskrift
• Förlag: SAGE Publications
• Ämne: Political Science
• Nyckelord: ambiguity; ethics; feminism; Foucault; Lorde; prefiguration; queer theory; self-care
• Aktiv: Inpress
• ISBN/ISSN/Övrigt: ISSN: 1464-7001