Womanist Thinkers Redefining Rest and Resistance
The Commodification of Wellness: What Happens When Wellness Becomes a Product?
What do we do when “self-care” begins as tending to psychic and spiritual health, but then devolves into what we now know as wellness? Womanist creatives and thinkers do not believe that you need to spend hundreds of dollars on products or workout sessions to feel better about living under capitalism. They, and myself included, believe that rest is the key to liberation.
Wellness is coded as white, and it starts with the physical space. Things like expensive minimal aesthetic, appropriated religious symbols and white walls point towards a selling point.
Wellness Spaces: A Visual and Cultural Landscape
Wellness has increasingly become a space dominated by whiteness, and its physical spaces reflect that. White walls, minimal aesthetics, and appropriated spiritual symbols—such as Buddha statues—are often used. These objects are stripped of their cultural significance and rebranded as part of a wellness trend that prioritizes profit over purpose. The essence and intention of these spiritual objects are lost once commodified for wellness consumption.
In these spaces, wellness is no longer about serving the community but about how much money can be made. Services like yoga sessions, spa treatments, or saunas are marketed as necessities, creating a false sense of urgency. They encourage people to spend money, with the promise that doing so will make them better, more productive citizens. But what’s missing is a focus on true well-being or liberation.
The Womanist Perspective: A Challenge to Capitalist Wellness
For Womanists, wellness looks very different from what is sold in commercialized spaces. The mainstream wellness industry often promotes guilt, shame, and unattainable standards under the guise of “self-care,” perpetuating cycles of self-starvation and emotional exhaustion. Womanists, on the other hand, advocate for rest, self-acceptance, and a reclaiming of wellness on our own terms. This alternative vision is one of resistance, not consumerism.
Redefining Wellness: The Rise of Black Women-Owned Wellness Spaces
The rise of Black women-led wellness initiatives offers a much-needed antidote to the white-washed wellness industry. Sinikiwe Dhilwayo, founder of Naaya Wellness, is one of many women who noticed the harmful visual narratives prevalent in mainstream wellness. In an interview with Byrdie, Dhilwayo shared that she created Naaya Wellness as a direct response to the wealthy, able-bodied images that dominate wellness advertising. She reimagined wellness to embrace inclusivity and to represent a more holistic vision of well-being.
Similarly, Elisa Shankle, co-founder of a wellness center in Brooklyn, noticed the same problematic elements in wellness spaces. In discussions about decolonizing wellness, she emphasized the importance of rethinking the design of physical spaces to better reflect diverse experiences and to create a more inclusive atmosphere for healing.
Yoga and Meditation: Co-opted Practices in White-Washed Wellness
As a teen, I was deeply engaged with yoga practices and meditation, two things that were also co-opted by the wellness industry. I learned meditative deep breathing when I attended a workshop held by a Japanese monk in college. He talked about the history that informed the work, and thousands of years that went into cultivating the practice of meditation.
This is not something that was ever mentioned when I would go to CorePower Yoga studio. It was always a thin white women at the reception desk, smiling and so bubbly that I felt like vomiting. I could never stand the disingenuous “nice” mask that white women put on in public. It’s fucking exhausting. I find this “nice” mask is the same thing that happens with white-washed wellness. On the surface, it feels like a warm bath. But if you lift up the GAIAM yoga mat of deception, you will see the filth and dust built up.
Representation in Wellness: The Lack of Diversity
Picture someone going to a studio, and joining a yoga class. They walk into reception and are greeted by a bubbly white woman, smiling like the Chesire cat. Who do you see?
For me, every time, I am going to see a Black woman. I’ve unpacked a lot of the white supremacist patriarchal noise that I grew up to see as normal. Even then, that Black woman I see is usually thin and cisgender. She has long braids, and brown skin, but not dark-skinned. Even though I’ve been committed to doing the work of consciously decolonizing my mind since 17, it does not make me immune from my own biases.
Wellness as Resistance: A Legacy of Black Feminist Thought
There are some folks who have been doing the terrifying work of writing, researching, and talking about wellness as resistance.
Aurde Lorde’s writing was my first encounter with the liberatory power of self-care. Her work is one that has been sharpened and turned into a weapon by white feminists. When she wrote about it in her 1988 essay, A Burst of Light, she probably wasn’t expecting white feminists 30 years later to run away with the idea.
Womanist Thinkers and the Future of Wellness
As a response to the ongoing commodification and marginalization of Black women’s experiences, several womanist thinkers are pushing the boundaries of what wellness should look like. These women have been reimagining rest and self-care, bringing an intersectional and liberatory framework to the wellness industry. They challenge the dominant narrative that wellness must be tied to consumerism, instead emphasizing the importance of community, rest, and self-love in healing.
By reclaiming wellness from capitalist structures, womanists offer a powerful alternative—a vision of well-being that honors the body, mind, and spirit without exploiting marginalized communities. In doing so, they create space for true healing, where self-care is not a privilege but a right accessible to all.
Womanist Thinkers Redefining Rest and Resistance
To cut through the noise of commodified wellness, here are insights from five Womanist thinkers reshaping self-care:
Tricia Hershey: Grind Culture
Tricia Hershey “dissolves” the boundaries between performance artist and writer. She believes that rest is resistance, and her work is focused on “opening portals and possibilities of world-building and future-casting while embodying the teachings of somatics, womanism, womanist theology, Black Liberation Theology, Afrofuturism, and her ancestors.” She currently has two books out, Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto and We Will Rest!: The Art of Escape.
What follows is the transcript from the podcast, In The Wild, in which Hershey was interviewed. She talked about the origins of her organization, The Nap Ministry:
“And people were really mad at me for even saying anything about white supremacy. When I first started being like, “Grind culture is making you not sleep. Rest is a form of resistance because it disrupts and pushes back against capitalism and white supremacy. I had so much hate thrown at me.
So many people who were like, “That makes no sense. What is white supremacy have to do with sleeping?” So that’s the thing: white supremacy has bamboozled us to the point of where we really can’t even see what's really happening. That’s why rest is so important, because rest does give you the space to actually see what's happening.
When you talk about grind culture, grind culture is simply white supremacist work culture. White supremacist work culture is an extractive culture. It’s hustle culture. It’s seeing productivity as a function of your worth.
Whatever white supremacy is doing on a global scale to us and has done, white supremacy has been using the body as a tool for destruction since the beginning of time. To not name and put white supremacy in the center of this would be…it doesn’t make sense. So you have to speak about it. When you speak about capitalism, you can’t speak about that without speaking about white supremacy.
I really was able to land that and understand that by studying what was happening during plantation labor. Studying what was happening during the transatlantic trade, the middle passage, centuries and centuries of plantation labor.
What that all was, was capitalism beginning. It was all done as a tool to be produced, to make money. [Simply put], the whole entire economic infrastructure of American culture was built off the backs of Native people and also Africans.
I think we are so used to ignoring and we think white supremacy is only one thing. It's being pulled over by the police. It’s poverty being a reality.
White supremacy rules and is the oppressive hand of everything that is happening in our culture. Grind culture is nothing but a continuation of what was happening on plantations for centuries really.
I think the consequence of it is what we're seeing now. I mean, biologically, what is happening to our bodies when we don't sleep, sleep deprivation is a public health issue.
It’s also a spiritual issue. It’s also a spiritual death that’s happening to us. It’s a physical and biological death that’s happening to our bodies. Our bodies are being used as a tool of oppression. They want to own our bodies.”
Dayna Lynn Nuckolls: Revolution Begins in the Body
Dayna Lynn Nuckolls, The People’s Oracle, uses tools of divination to connect the spiritual with political resistance. Most folks think of the Greeks when they think of the Zodiac signs, but her work focuses on decolonizing astrology, a practice with its origins in Africa.
Back in January of 2023, she wrote a horoscope detailing the impact of Saturn’s placement in Capricorn. One of Capricorn’s coping strategies works by repressing the needs of the body when they are ignored:
“When an adult’s struggles and the anguish that arises in response to those struggles are not met with care, concern, and resources to alleviate the distress, that adult will not be present to and aware of their suffering.
Especially when that adult looks around to see others experiencing the same conditions and somehow continuing onward anyhow, Business Goes On As Usual. A disregarded body disregards itself.
To feel, to regard one’s body, to respond to your distress with attention and concern, even when you lack the resources to alleviate your suffering, is the necessary first act of resistance. This is why revolution begins in the body.
If I willfully reject the disregard of those who have the power to alleviate my suffering, if I refuse to internalize that disregard as a model for how I should be in relationship with my body, I become an instrument that disrupts the status quo.
It is incredibly difficult for the people around me and in my life to ignore their bodies when I refuse to ignore mine. In fact, people will go to great lengths to avoid being affected. They will say that the person feeling is over-exaggerating, that they are lying and that nothing is wrong.
They will say that they are just trying to gain sympathy and attention. Yes! Yes! That is exactly it. When I am in distress and pain I need sympathy and attention. Give it to me, won’t you?”
Tressie M. Cottom: The Hustle Economy
Tressie M. Cottom is a professor, writer, and sociologist. I was first introduced to her work when I read THICK, her 2019 collection of essays that challenges and bends the genre form.
In this quote, she breaks down racial capitalism and its effect on the body:
“The concept of racial capitalism posits that racialization is a primary project for all capitalist activities, from accumulation to extraction. This holds for the future of work as much as the past. Racial capitalism identifies the hustle not just as a response to inequalities in the formal economy but as a kind of racial theater.
Black people—and Black women especially—are shut out of traditional employment, but our culture applauds the hustler who responds to exclusion by striking out on her own. As brands and digital platforms celebrate grit and urge us to “respect the hustle,” the realities of who succeeds and who stays struggling are lost.
Some argue that in contrast to the formal economy’s rush for accumulation, the informal economy is driven by the unmet needs of the exploited classes. Still, the informal economy, which serves as a pressure valve for the formal economy, has its own set of underlying social relations. The theater of the hustle obscures some of these relations and emphasizes others.
Mostly, it distracts us from the diffuse nature of extraction today. Hustling encompasses legal, semi-legal, illegal, and small-scale enterprises, but it also includes precarious workers in professions that have shifted to the hustle economy even when their titles do not reflect it. This is a global and varied phenomenon. But the larger story is about the expansion of the informal economy by shifting the relations of production that underpin the formal economy.”
Sonya Renee Taylor: The Medical Industrial Complex
Sonya Renee Taylor is a poet and author who writes about body liberation and reimagines the concept of self-love.
This excerpt is from her book, The Body Is Not an Apology.
“Dr. Deb Burgard, a renowned eating disorders therapist and pioneer in the Health at Every Size (HAES) movement, co-created a brilliant animated video called “The Danger of Poodle Science” to explain body diversity and the perils of assessing health and wellness based on assumptions about size.
In it, Dr. Burgard details how absurd it would be if we assessed the health of all dogs by comparing them to the size and health of poodles. Better yet, what if the poodles decided that all other dogs should look, eat, and be the same size as poodles? The video pokes fun at our medical industry and its one-size-fits-all orientation toward bodies.
Rather than acknowledging and basing research on the premise that diversity in weight and size are natural occurrences in humans, we treat larger bodies with poodle science and then pathologize those bodies by using the rhetoric of health. “I just want this complete stranger, whose life I know nothing about and who I have made no effort to get to know beyond this Twitter thread, to be healthy.” This is called health trolling or concern trolling, and it is just another sinister body shame tactic.
Given that we can make no accurate assessment of any individual’s health based simply on their weight (or photo on social media), it is evident that such behavior is not really about the person’s health but more likely about the ways in which we expect other bodies to conform to our standards and beliefs about what a body should or should not look like.
Equally damaging is our insistence that all bodies should be healthy. Health is not a state we owe the world. We are not less valuable, worthy, or loveable because we are not healthy. Lastly, there is no standard of health that is achievable for all bodies.
Our belief that there should be anchors the systemic oppression of ableism and reinforces the notion that people with illnesses and disabilities have defective bodies rather than different bodies. Each of us will have varying degrees of health and wellness throughout our lives and our arbitrary demands and expectations as it relates to the health and size of people’s bodies fuels inequality and injustice. Quite simply, everyone is not a poodle, and that is okay. Boy would the world be a boring, yappy place if we all were.”
