Queering Self-Care: Reimagining The Radical Possibilities of Self-Care In Healing From Sexual Assault

Abstract

Self-care is an umbrella term for the personal strategies, activities and routines used by survivors to manage the trauma of sexual assault. This paper explores the appropriation of self-care practices in neoliberal ‘risk-management’ and ‘prevention’ discourses. By tracing the problematic impact that neoliberalism has had on mainstream social, medical and political narratives surrounding healing from sexual assault, this paper calls for a ‘queering’ of self-care. In theorizing ‘queer self-care’, this paper works to reclaim and redefine self-care in way which challenges pathologized healing narratives, and validates ‘non normative’ means of coping and caring for the self as valuable to the process of healing from sexual assault.