The Self-Care Paradox: From Nursing Theory to Neoliberal Subjectivity

Area of Science:

• Nursing Theory
• Sociology of Health
• Critical Health Studies

Background:

• Self-care is normatively privileged in nursing, framed as empowerment and autonomy.
• Critical scholarship has challenged this framing, highlighting individualism and neoliberal health responsibilities.
• The normative function of self-care within nursing's conceptual frameworks requires deeper examination.

Purpose of the Study:

• To theoretically analyze self-care as a subject-forming discourse.
• To re-examine Orem's Self-Care Deficit Nursing Theory as a baseline.
• To investigate how neoliberal discourse transforms self-care from capacity to obligation and impacts subject positions.

Main Methods:

• Theoretical analysis of self-care discourse.
• Revisiting Dorothea Orem's Self-Care Deficit Nursing Theory.
• Drawing on Byung-Chul Han's concept of the achievement subject.

Main Results:

• Neoliberal health discourse reconfigures self-care from a capacity into an obligation.
• Self-care discourse contributes to subject positions where responsibility is internalized, vulnerability is seen as inadequacy, and care-seeking is perceived as personal failure.
• These effects are unevenly distributed across demographics and can be resisted.

Conclusions:

• The self-care paradox highlights how self-care discourse can lead to internalized inadequacy and reluctance to seek care.
• Nursing theory must address the subjective formation of individuals under neoliberal self-care mandates.
• Further attention is needed on how these subject positions are formed, resisted, and reinterpreted within nursing practice and theory.