CFP for Book Chapters: From Wine Moms to QAnon: The Violence at the Heart of White Women’s Lifestyle Culture

From Wine Moms to QAnon: White Supremacy and White Women’s Lifestyle Culture

This proposed edited collection historicizes the harms leveled by the white middle
class’s appropriation of Audre Lorde’s investment in self-care. More specifically, we
consider how the aspirational empowerment and self-improvement industry has
emerged as a force that obscures the violence embedded in individualism, neglects
collective trauma, and negates the possibility of collective solutions. Inspired by
Kyla Schuller’s observation that white women’s culture often “presents capitalism
as the deliverer of equality” and thus obscures how how “capitalism is actually a
chief engine of social harm,” we seek essays that explore how the white
self-care/wellness industry—broadly defined from the eighteenth century to the
present day—exerts a discipline that narrows the radical possibilities of what
carework could mean, either for oneself, one’s family, or for one’s community.

Questions that guide the collection include:
● What historical lineages does white women’s wellness culture draw upon? How do these
histories contextualize current iterations of white women’s wellness culture?
● Through what cultural apparatuses are the links between and among white women,
wellness and violence produced?
● How is white, privileged motherhood deployed within a capitalist framework to reassert
domesticity/martyrdom?
● How does the category of white, privileged motherhood enable the cultural work of white
supremacy?
● In what ways does the individualized work of wellness hide the violence of capitalism
and resultant harms between and among women?