Wild Self-Care

Abstract

Self-care has become a major topic in recent years; everyone seems to be talking about it. Within the academy, discussions on self-care often revolve around the neoliberalisation of self-care, how these practices commodify bodies and lives, and the intimate relationship between the biomedical model of health and self-care. This article takes a radical departure from the current purview of self-care discussions and offers an emancipatory alternative: ‘wild self-care’. This ‘wild’ model of self-care considers how creative, alternative, transgressive, and/or unexpected forms of care can be legitimate ways of pursuing well-being. Wild self-care is highly emotional in nature, articulates the way care is inherently communal, and ultimately grounded in the pursuit for agency. Drawing from a set of interviews conducted with 16 individuals in Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia who identified as a gay/queer man or a member of the gay community, I describe a range of different wild self-care practices and demonstrate how sex work, drug use, sex in public, kink, and alternative forms of political activism can be used as legitimate ways of caring for the self and pursuing well-being.