ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on wellness culture, which primarily targets itself to affluent, modern, white women, in order to examine articulations of white femininity. In particular, the chapter addresses how logics of wellness today constitute a modality through which a contemporary modern – i.e. cool, sophisticated and liberal – white womanhood is made and remade. Intersecting gender and critical whiteness theory, Shome shows how this modern white womanhood reflects a cosmopolitan and ‘woke’ white femininity that distances itself from insular expressions of whiteness. Shome uses the term white femininity as a reference to an ideological and material structure – a network of relations from economy to geopolitics – through which meanings and scripts about upper-class able-bodied North Atlantic Western white women and their place in society are constituted and reconstituted in particular times and context. White femininity is a relational category, and Shome illustrates how its structures of production and maintenance are linked to inequalities that position women of colour and women from the Global South unequally in society. The chapter illustrates how modern structure of white femininity in the North Atlantic West – and specifically the United States – on the one hand seems liberal, sophisticated and cosmopolitan, while, on the other, remains intimately situated in racial extractions.
