CAPAS RESEARCH PROJECT - Emily Ray Apocalyptic Wellness: The Bunkerized Subject meets with Wellness Industry
Wellness is a broad category of behaviors, practices, and beliefs that constitutes a multi-trillion-dollar global industry. Wellness intersects with doomsday prepping in practice and theory, as both shore up the individual’s body against the psychic and biological damage inflicted by the modern industrial world. To survive, one must account for the vulnerabilities to which they are exposed and take precautionary and remedial measures against them. Wellness is not just about promoting exceptional health; it is also a consumer response to living in apocalyptic times, where chemicals, microplastics, political instability, and poor global leadership are driving humans and the planet to their deaths. Wellness allows the responsibilized subject to consume their way out of these harms and into a position to survive and shape the post-apocalyptic future.
My study of wellness traces the influences of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Central European thinkers and healers on current wellness culture and its economy. In tracing these trends, ideologies, and practices, I explore their confluence with doomsday prepping and the formation of the "bunkerized subject." Wellness and prepping entail reclaiming a way of life that allows people to experience disciplined lives on Earth to outlive world-ending disasters. Living in apocalyptic times is thus negotiated through savvy consumer choices. Thinking of these subjectivities and everyday practices in the context of apocalypse offers new insights into how vast and powerful the apocalyptic narrative is, while demonstrating how the concept of the apocalypse can function productively.