Researching Contemporary Wellness Cultures

The spread of conspiracy theories and associated vaccine rejection within the wellness industry and spiritual communities during the COVID-19 pandemic attracted significant media and scholarly attention. Informed by the ‘(Con)spirituality, Science and COVID-19 in Australia’ project (2020–2021) (Halafoff, Marriott, et al., 2022; Halafoff, Weng, et al., 2022; Roginski & Rocha, 2022), funded by the Templeton Religion Trust and awarded via the International Research Network for the Study of Science and Belief in Society (INSBS), this chapter reports on findings pertaining to holistic spirituality, purity doctrines and wellness, arising from a parallel pilot study on ‘Spirituality and Wellness (SWell) in Australia’ (2021). Both studies have revealed a ‘spiritual complexity’ in Australia and internationally, and the authors report on this here, focussed particularly on spirituality’s quest for pristine bodies, and on spiritual ‘moral communities’ (Ganga Kieffer, 2023) exceptionalism and relationality.

Widespread news coverage, politicised debate and social media commentary have given prominence to COVID-19 as an unparalleled threat to global health and mortality, intensifying panic and insecurity worldwide. In response, the endorsement and amplification of false claims about the pandemic has proliferated, in many cases, by public figures in the online ‘wellness’ realm. Using COVID-19 as a case study, this chapter interrogates observed connections between digital wellness cultures and informational disorders in times of crisis. The authors discuss the bourgeois liberal-individualist ideals that increasingly underpin much of this communication, exemplified through the co-option of social justice rhetoric and narratives of the ‘persecuted hero’. The authors also recognise the growing number of wellness influencers openly resisting pandemic-related mis/disinformation, and note the forms of anti-individualist, mutual care demonstrated in these ‘debunking’ efforts. The authors argue that these practices reflect a form of networked solidarity – enacted alongside a discursive distancing from individualist modes of thinking – that can be understood by applying a social ecological framework for understanding ‘resilience’.

The ‘fit healthy’ body has been invoked in popular discourse as far less vulnerable to communicable diseases like the novel coronavirus both in mainstream accounts of the pandemic and in more fringe anti-vaccine discourse. Those opposed to vaccination argue the management of the body through diet and exercise allows for natural immune processes to manage COVID-19. This chapter interrogates anti-vaccine sentiment in Western countries such as Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States to demonstrate the pervasiveness of discourses that position the maintenance of a ‘fit healthy’ ideal body as an alternative to preventative medicine such as vaccines. Drawing on several key examples, this conceptual chapter explores the ways bodily ‘wellness’ became a part of vaccine hesitancy discourse during the pandemic, as risk is balanced through calculations of what vaccines might ‘do’ to a body and the body’s capacity to respond to illness.

Symptom control is a key aim of advanced cancer and palliative care. Yet, wellbeing in this context is complex, highly contextual, and contested. The World Health Organisation’s (WHO, 2021, p. 10) recent definition of wellbeing, for example, emphasises ‘meaning and purpose’. Models of care – such as the biopsychosocial model – aim to attend to this complexity. And such models matter: if assessments of an intervention lowlight effects relating to psychological and social domains, the potential benefits of these interventions may go unrecognised. In this chapter, the authors provide the results of a review of symptom assessment scales used in advanced cancer and palliative care settings. Combining the analytic strengths of a critical review with the brevity of a rapid review (Grant & Booth, 2009), this critical rapid review asks: to what degree do scales measuring the impacts/effects of symptoms on wellbeing in advanced cancer contexts incorporate the three components of the ‘biopsychosocial’ model: biological, psychological, and social? Findings – considered in the context of conflicting evidence on the effectiveness of medicinal cannabis in supporting patient wellbeing – show that only five of the eleven scales identified through the review attend to social aspects of wellbeing. These findings reinforce critiques of the biopsychosocial model and demonstrate the dominance of dualistic, biomedical conceptualisations of wellbeing. Drawing on Barry et al.’s (2008) scholarship on interdisciplinarity, the findings underscore the limitations of numeric measures of wellbeing conducted in isolation and support calls for an ontological reimagination of wellbeing in advanced cancer and palliative care contexts.

The past two decades have witnessed exponential growth in the use of mindfulness-based programmes within professional workplace cultures. From digital media giants such as Google, Apple and Facebook, to Fortune 500 companies, hospitals, universities, and government departments, many contemporary workplaces now offer mindfulness-based programmes as a remedy for workplace challenges such as low productivity, employee stress and staff attrition. Using Google’s Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute as a case study, this chapter adopts Lauren Berlant’s concept of ‘cruel optimism’ as a critical framework for re-evaluating the affective and relational experiences of mindfulness within the contemporary neoliberal workplace. Specifically, it considers the ways in which corporate mindfulness initiatives commonly use the rubric of ‘employee wellbeing’ and ‘self-care’ to pathologise employee experiences of boredom, dissatisfaction and stress while downplaying the social, political and economic factors that contribute to workplace dissatisfaction and employee burnout.

Wellness has moved beyond its original emancipatory roots to become a mechanism for self-optimisation. In this chapter, the authors examine how wellness transforms or ‘wellness washes’ pleasurable practices into rationalised and instrumentalised ones. The authors argue that one of the key drivers of ‘wellness washing’ is the entanglement of wellness with and in contemporary workplaces. In advance of this analysis, the authors examine digital pleasures, ASMR and digital drugs to examine how pleasures mediated and afforded by the screen are ‘wellness washed’ to better position them as normative cultural practices.

Past research has shown that wellness culture projects identities that are predominantly middle-class, white, thin, able-bodied women. Wellness cultures are amplified through digital media, namely highly visual social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, that promote a feminine ideal that women can (and should) achieve through rigorous commitment and investment. However, discourses surrounding wellness culture are a cause for concern when consumption, choice, and responsibility are positioned as a mode to constantly improve oneself until an idealised appearance is achieved.

In this chapter, the author explores the experiences of five Asian-Australian women aged 18–35 living in Australia as they navigate ideals of femininity. The author draws on perspectives from feminist new materialism to understand the material-discursive practices that form norms and ideals of the female body. Findings are presented in the form of vignettes to help trace affective encounters with objects, digital media, discourses, and other bodies that produce different affective relations as they seek to understand Asian-Australian femininity. The author argues that digital media and wellness culture prompt individual understanding and practices to adhere to transnational ideals of the feminine body rather than dismantling social and cultural norms that limit individual choice, an issue that has thus far received limited scholarly attention for Asian-Australians. This chapter builds on previous studies that position wellness culture within an established white female neoliberal rhetoric.

This chapter considers the evolution of diet culture in the digital age, particularly focussing on the proliferation of anti-diet and holistic wellness sentiments, which paradoxically work to conceal the ongoing persistence of diet culture. A discourse analysis approach was conducted on ‘What I Eat In A Day’ (WIEIAD) YouTube videos to examine the ways in which diet choices are narrated and rationalised to achieve the illusion of the ‘disappearance’ of diet culture. The author explores how this has produced the pressure to have (or more accurately perform) a ‘healthy’ relationship with food. This is ambiguously defined and embodied online, but some recurring themes have been observed through my analysis. The author argues that these WIEIAD videos often risk obscuring the persistence of diet culture by positioning it in the past when, as this chapter will attempt to demonstrate, it is very much embedded in the current diet discourse. Weight loss and appearance are downplayed as motivations for engaging in health and wellness. However, they are very much still beneath the surface. While the conversation around dieting might be less overtly problematic than it was in the past, there continues to be a significant amount of vigilance and effort required for women to meet conventional beauty standards. In addition to the material practice of dieting, there is now the pressure to perform the emotional labour of ‘talking away’ accusations of disordered eating, upholding the premature ideal of a post-diet culture era.

Since its creation in 2005, YouTube has become a site for significant community building, as the platform and its affordances encourage active audiences. One creator in the YouTube wellness space is Abbey Sharp, a registered dietitian who reviews ‘What I Eat in a Day’ videos of popular YouTube creators. Sharp’s videos follow the traditional ‘reaction video’ format; she’s positioned as both viewer and consumer, providing commentary on dietary choices and wellness claims. The author investigates Sharp’s role in the spread of wellness misinformation through a life narrative lens as she participates in the wellness community while actively combatting misinformation. Sharp utilises trends and platform affordances to act against health and wellness misinformation. Sharp’s reaction video format creates a collaborative space, where the original creator is taken out of the context of their video and edited into a space where they are critiqued through the lens of a ‘professional’ other. The author argues that Sharp’s health professional status (and reach of over 570,000 subscribers) provides legitimacy to her critique and consequently alters how wellness narratives on YouTube are consumed.

This chapter considers the role and significance of ‘wellness’ as an idealised image, mode of being and subjecthood connected to ‘a perfect life’ in neoliberal Western contexts, which is made particularly visible through social media platforms such as Instagram. I discuss how ‘wellness’ is attached to particular bodily styles of presentation and appearance, such as the ‘Instagram influencer’, drawing on data from a qualitative study that used interview and digital photo-voice methods to explore how young people make sense of and encounter ‘perfect social media bodies’. I draw on feminist new materialist understandings of the body as socially and materially co-produced to theorise the body as assembled through the socio-material conditions of everyday life. This theorisation contributes to emerging efforts to interrogate the sociological and material dynamics of ‘wellness’ assemblages as important contemporary modes through which bodies (particularly connected to gendered aspects of feminine bodies) are felt and lived. Importantly, the gendered bodily appearances coded as representing an ‘ideal life’ and ‘perfect body’, which align with comportments of ‘wellness’, are central for understanding how aesthetic capital and bodily value are attributed in a Western neoliberal context. This analysis aims to contribute to feminist analyses of the affective and socio-material dynamics through which bodies and images ‘become’ through each other. The chapter concludes with an examination of the paradoxical and jarring dimensions signalled in the promises of wellness as a pursuit towards attaining an ‘ideal life’ against the backdrop of late capitalism and impending climate collapse.