ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the affective worlds of neoliberalism and the structures of feeling that accompany enterprise culture. Neoliberalism engenders an all-too common and collective sense of depression, anxiety, and illness. Yet, instead of resisting and transforming the shared structures that condition our everyday lives and make us sick, we are encouraged engage in individualized and privatized practices of self-care—specifically, the financialization of the self and the privatization of happiness. These practices of self-care rely on cruel optimism, shutting down critical capacities for social interconnection and political intervention. This chapter also considers how alternative practices of self-care, animated by feminist senses of commonality, collective caretaking, shared vulnerability, and equality, might cultivate capacities for imagining, inhabiting, and building a world beyond neoliberalism.
