Sabahat Ali Wani critiques the ‘resilience expertise’ of self-help books
Asylum’s cover image for this year’s summer issue read: ‘They call us resilient while they tighten the grip around our necks’. When I saw these words, I flipped through the pages of the edited book Vulnerability in Resistance (2016) and found the image of a poster, created by Candy Chang, a Taiwanese-American artist, that read: ‘Stop calling me RESILIENT. Because every time you say “Oh, they’re resilient”, that means you can do something else to me. I am not resilient’.
We are seeing the word resilience (almost) everywhere, but the self-help industry has been using this word for some time in its manufacturing, marketing, and selling strategies. The self-help industry claims to have psychological expertise about the self and then sells this expertise to people in various product forms aimed at personal wellness, development and growth. Self-help books are often best-sellers and their focus on resilience seems to be growing.
In Bouncing Back: Vulnerability and Resistance in Times of Resilience, Sarah Bracke mentions that a quick search using the keyword ‘resilience’ in Amazon’s book section ‘revealed about five thousand titles’ and ‘more than one thousand of those were published after 2013’. Recently, I conducted the same exercise and noted that after 2016, the number went up to a soaring fifty thousand and, out of those, about ten thousand (20% of the total) were clubbed under the genre of ‘health, family and personal development’, including the sub-genres of ‘family and relationships’, ‘healthy living and wellness’, ‘personal transformation’ and ‘self-help’. Most of these books were published during and after 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic peaked. It was a time of extreme loss and even now, years later – I can’t bounce back from what happened, I can’t be resilient. But we’re being taught, trained and expected to become the resilient citizens of a resilient nation-state, resilient workers of a resilient economy, and resilient members of a resilient society.
Mark Neocleous argues, in his striking commentary Resisting Resilience, that the rise of the ‘theme of resilience as a personal attribute’ in self-help books discloses the strong link between ‘the economic development of neo-liberal subjectivity and the political development of resilient citizenship’. As neo-liberal citizens, we have to undergo resilience training so that the state and capital can ensure their survival. He argues that under the insecure, crisis-prone, capitalist, neo-liberal system, good subjects have to ‘survive and thrive in any situation’. For example, people have to ‘achieve balance’ across the several insecure and part-time jobs they might have, ‘overcome life’s hurdles’ such as facing retirement without a pension to speak of, and just ‘bounce back’ from whatever society throws at them, whether it be cuts to benefits, wage freezes or global economic meltdown’.
Women have a greater share in the reading of self-help books and are being coached to practice resilience and be individually responsible for whatever happens to them. Women will bend and break but in the end will bounce back, but for what? To be bent and broken again?
Exploring the gendered aspects of resilience, Sarah Bracke argues that women are being instructed to carry the burden of change, growth and wellness on their backs. In these ‘resilient times’, they have to be responsible for their own physical and mental health, the food they buy and consume, the education, jobs, pay and treatment they receive, and their relationships. This is the main problem with self-help’s promotion of resilience: its aggressive emphasis on individual responsibility for surviving anything and everything that patriarchal and capitalist society throws at us.
On a personal note, I am more than willing to know about the self-help pundits’ ten rules, fifteen ways and twelve secrets that can change my life. However, can I really change my life? Do I really have that choice? These days, we hear lots of privileged chatter about good, healthy eating and how we are individually responsible for the quality and quantity of food on our dinner tables. But for most of us, the food that we get, buy and eat was never an individual-choice issue to begin with. It’s about social justice.
In her compact and well-argued Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power, Lola Olufemi says: ‘On the commute home from work, mothers across the country are already thinking about what to make for dinner. For the poorest women, often this thought process is filled with anxiety. They do not have the luxury of considering nutritional value: of mulling over and picking the foods that might be best for their child’s development or health. The demands on their body and time mean they can only think about what will fill their stomachs. Maybe they’re counting coins, maybe they are thinking about how best to utilise the last can of beans from the food bank’.
Women – who are going hungry, whose families are starving, who are being deprived of essential resources, who do not have access to proper education and healthcare, who are writhing in precarious, exploitative and predatory occupational conditions, who are commuting via unsafe, over-loaded public transport, who are being attacked, abused and killed every day – are being labelled as ‘resilient’, which according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary means that they are ‘capable of withstanding shock without permanent deformation or rupture’. This is an active, cunning attempt to colonise our socio-political imaginations and make us believe that the systemic inequalities and structural pathologies are to be individually survived rather than collectively resisted.
Mark Neocleous points out that ‘resilience is, by definition, against resistance. Resilience wants acquiescence, not resistance. Not a passive acquiescence, for sure, but it does demand that we accommodate ourselves to capital and the state, and to the secure future of both, rather than to resist them’. Resistance entails fighting back, but resilience emphasises us surviving the attack. It doesn’t equip us with the tools and resources to live and lead a just, safe, healthy, and equitable life; rather, it aims to turn us into punching bags.
In his book Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self, Nikolas Rose explains how the tools and technologies of behaviour modification (like self-help books) are ‘double-edged’ because ‘they institute, as the other side of their promise of autonomy and success, a constant self-doubt, a constant scrutiny and evaluation of how one performs, the construction of one’s personal part in social existence as something to be calibrated and judged in its minute particulars’. And because of that, ‘the self becomes the target of a reflexive objectifying gaze, committed not only to its own technical perfection but also to the belief that “success” and “failure” should be construed in the vocabulary of happiness, wealth, style, and fulfilment and interpreted as consequent upon the self-managing capacities of the self’.
If the self is not resilient, if it can’t bounce back, if it isn’t straight up on its feet after bending, falling and breaking down, the self is lacking. It’s not hungry enough to taste success, to climb up the ladder and be among the top one-per cent of alpha males and boss girls. Non-resilience is a mark of ‘lazy, weak and unambitious people’, who ‘sit all day’, ‘don’t have discipline’ and ‘don’t want to work anymore’. Resilience makes not being able to bounce back a trait of ‘quitters and losers’.
This is what we are being fed, what we are consuming through books, courses, talks, podcasts and other behaviour modification tools of an ongoing ‘hustle culture’. We are told to be resilient and survive all of their blows, hits, kicks and punches, while they make sure to rain abuse on us – again and again.
Sabahat Ali Wani is a feminist writer, researcher, critic, and visual artist from Kashmir. She is the founder and editor of a Kashmir-based feminist literary and cultural magazine, Maaje Zevwe. Currently she is studying and documenting the resistance arts scene of Kashmir from a decolonial feminist lens.
This is a sample article from the Autumn 2024 issue of Asylum Magazine (31.3). To read more. . . Subscribe to Asylum.