Breathe In, Breathe Out, Shoot to Kill: Women, Wellness and Fascism

Featuring Alyson K. Spurgas Madhuri Sastry and Bhakti Shringarpure

Celebrity wellness influencer Gwenyth Paltrow recently shocked the world with an ad selling real estate in Israel even as the settler colonial state’s genocide of Palestinians is being documented in real time. India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi instituted an International Yoga Day for the world while being engaged in fascism, censorship and violence towards Indian Muslims at home. Tradwife influencers stand for wholesome and healthy lifestyles alongside the notion that women should hark back to an idyllic time when white, Christian and male supremacy prevailed. There has been outrage about Israeli soldiers who spend their R&R traveling around India pursuing meditation, wellness and spirituality after committing genocide at home. The global wellness industry is priced at $6.8 trillion having doubled in size from just a decade ago. It is a big dirty business and this conversations unpacks it’s complicity with racism, fascism, patriarchy and violence.

Join Alyson K. Spurgas, Madhuri Sastry and Bhakti Shringarpure on Wednesday, July 8th, 12pm New York, 7pm Paris. Event will be livestreamed on Substack, YouTube and X. Set a reminder below to join:

Alyson K. Spurgas is writer, researcher and Associate Professor of Sociology at Trinity College (Hartford). She is the author of Diagnosing Desire: Biopolitics and Femininity into the Twenty-First Century (2020) and the co-author of Decolonize Self-Care (2022).

Madhuri Sastry is a writer and editor with a background in human rights law. She is the Culture Editor at The Polis Project and has written for Bitch Media, Slate, Catapult and Guernica, among several other publications.

Bhakti Shringarpure is a writer, editor and creative director of the Radical Books Collective. She is the author of Cold War Assemblages: From Decolonization to Digital and the forthcoming Leila Aboulela: Writing as Refuge.