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Traces the undercurrent of exclusion and violence in the US wellness industry from the nineteenth century to our current moment
Women's wellness is a trillion-dollar industry, a lifestyle choice, and more recently, a pipeline for dangerous conspiracy theories. The very spaces promoting yoga routines, “clean” eating, and free births also offer troubling prescriptions to an ailing populace through podcasts and social media posts.
How did we get here?
Since the nineteenth century, millions of women in the U.S. have turned to wellness influencers and natural remedies to cure what ails them, only to find more poison in the guise of health advice. Hatred is Health brings together feminist scholars from American literary and cultural history to trace the ideological roots of the contemporary wellness industry from the nineteenth century to our present moment, revealing how the language of maternal protection, natural living, and self-determination have long been in conversation with white supremacy, eugenics, and conspiratorial thinking.
The first step toward understanding the obsession with an increasingly narrow view of wellness requires disentangling the genuine desire for women's health and empowerment from the forces that have so effectively exploited that desire.
Elizabeth Marshall is a writer and Professor. She’s the author of The Drinking Curriculum: A Cultural History of Childhood and Alcohol, Witnessing Girlhood (with Leigh Gilmore), and Graphic Girlhoods: Visualizing Education and Violence. Her essays have appeared in TIME, PopMatters, Rethinking Schools, The Conversation, and Current Affairs.
Anna Mae Duane (Edited By)
Anna Mae Duane is Professor of English at the University of Connecticut and Director of the UConn Humanities Institute. Her most recent works include Educated for Freedom, The Incredible Story of Two Fugitive Schoolboys Who Grew up to Change a Nation and Furious Feminisms: Alternate Routes on Mad Max Fury Road (co-authored with Alexis Boylan, Barb Gurr and Mike Gill).
Introduction: The Past is Present
Anna Mae Duane and Elizabeth A. Marshall
Part I. Health is Hatred: White Supremacy and Wellness Culture
Chapter 1. Can-Do Feminism: The “Eugenic Impulse” of White Women’s Wellness
Arielle Zibrak
Chapter 2. Eugen Sandow, Biopower, and the History of White Women’s Fitness
Jacqueline Brady
Chapter 3. Unmasked and Unvaxxed: Smiles, Spike Proteins, and Other Panics of Pandemic
Childhoods
Rebekah Sheldon
Part II. Community Is Isolation: Domestic Sovereignty vs. the Dangers of the Collective
Chapter 4. “Mom. Wife. Founder. Creator.”: Instagram Influencers, Wellness, and the Commodification of White Motherhood
Shayna Maskell
Chapter 5. Woods, Prairies, and Deserts: Pandemic Domesticity and White Women’s Retreat
Elizabeth Nathanson
Chapter 6. “You do not have to birth in captivity”: #Freebirth, Violence, and Sovereignty
Stephanie Hedge
Part III. White Is Black: Racial Doppelgangers and Double-Edged Hashtags
Chapter 7. Buying into Wealth, Wellness, and Whiteness in Ali Wong’s Standup-Special Baby Cobra
Weishun Lu
Chapter 8. “politics, faith, & everything in between 💫” : @little.miss.patriot and Conspiratorial Thinking on Instagram
Devin Burns
Chapter 9. Black Feminist Life Writing and White Women’s Plagiarism: Self-Help, Self-Care, and Self-Representation
Leigh Gilmore
Chapter 10. Mama Bears and Moral Panics: Wellness Motherhood and the Antislavery Rescue Fantasy
Anna Mae Duane
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Index