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And it's bullshit, because it contains zero acknowledgement of how the "wellness community" has for decades fostered and maintained the very cultic milieu and white supremacist ideologies that enabled QAnon to catch on like it has. https://twitter.com/kevinroose/status/1305517121049296896
What the "wellness community" is doing now is pure damage control. It is concerned primarily with its image and the fact that the articles and general rhetoric associating it with Q have finally hit critical mass and probably affecting sales of snake oil and MLM memberships.
The statement "written in collaboration with many folks" but first posted on fb by yoga teacher Seane Corn states "QAnon does NOT represent the true values of the wellness community."
Except where it TOTALLY DOES.
Except where it TOTALLY DOES.
The "wellness community" has always had at the very least an uncomfortably close relationship with white supremacy and cultic ideologies & behaviors. The first white institution to focus on how consumption behaviors affected health was Nazi Germany. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC535959/
As we know, the Nazis were obsessed with "purity," and that extended to environmental factors and the body itself. A superior Aryan nation fed on organic, "natural" food was essential to the "blood and soil" ideology. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-14/natural-food-and-nazis-fascism/10236768
Behind the Bastards has a great two-parter on the founder of Waldorf schools that also delves into this connection: https://twitter.com/bastardspod/status/1176526754250416128?s=20
Physical fitness and the perfection of the body through exercise also played a huge part in the Third Reich and other totalitarian regimes, as a means of both realizing an embodied national ideal and social/psychological control of a populace.
https://www.barbarakeys.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/The_Body_as_a_Political_Space_Comparing.pdf
https://www.barbarakeys.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/The_Body_as_a_Political_Space_Comparing.pdf
(ironically??? I am getting drunk while tweeting this stuff lol because I thought I was done screaming about Q on fb today, forgive me if I have to finish tomorrow)
So, the (white) conception of "wellness" is established as perfection of the individual self through achieving the physical embodiment of a set of agreed-upon nationalist and/or spiritual ideals. It's about control, and the elevation of the self through compliance.
Later in the 20th century, we see the distinct community of "alternative wellness" break off from the allopathic mainstream for...well, a LOT of complex reasons, some of them quite justified, especially in how allopathic medicine has treated marginalized communities.
That is huge, & I don't want to minimize it AT ALL. I am focusing on white supremacy within the mainstream of the "wellness community" itself, so when I use that term, I am referring to the white people who control the majority of "wellness" rhetoric + material resources.
Who also, in doing so, are appropriating all over the place from the health and spiritual practices of POC, and yes, THAT also has a very specific historical precedence. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-41757047
So, none of this is new. The thing with the (white) framing of "wellness" as the alternative to allopathic medicine is that it can now set itself up as a "cultural underground" therefore an oppositional, "dissenting space" to the dominant culture. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/cultic-milieus-and-extreme-right/
Of course, adopting the aesthetics of “dissent” doesn’t mean the wellness community actually divests itself from hegemonic devotion to white supremacist body/health hierarchies and the pursuit of individualist ascent via compliance with strict behavioral regimes.
