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Four decades of neoliberal approaches to the provision of care (medical care, mental health care, childcare, and eldercare, to name a few) have resulted in a crisis of care so ubiquitous as to appear natural. Among the unanticipated consequences of the redirection of women's labor from the unpaid sites of family and community into the paid labor market during second-wave feminism (coupled with an unprecedented privileging of commercial values with the emergence of neoliberal market fundamentalism) has been the social problem of a care deficit. What sociologist Lynn S. Chancer has called a "stalled revolution" and historian Kirsten Swinth describes as "feminism's unfinished business" has precipitated an array of care fixes and patches: persons suffering from the consequent care deficit (either exhausted from providing care at home and the office, or lacking in care for themselves, or both) are advised to engage in self-care and self-improvement. University students, staff, and faculty are advised to use counseling and meditation apps, seek out wellness opportunities, and/or employ coaches and advisers to manage their lives and well-being. This article takes these three ready-at-hand examples of neoliberal care provisioning as a point of departure, revisits an analysis of the political economy of care labor vis-à-vis political theorist Nancy Fraser, traces the transitions in the self-care proposals proposed in US self-improvement literatures from the 1960s through the present, and offers a set of suggestions regarding radical care emerging from the author's experience with academic labor organizing and an engagement with anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's model of emergent possibilities amid the disasters of capitalist accumulation.

Two recent books on marriage— Is Marriage for White People? by Ralph Richard Banks and Unhitched by Judith Stacey—are considered in this review essay by sociologist Micki McGee. Banks argues that the decline of marriage among African American women constitutes a social problem that could be remedied if more women from this group opted for interracial marriages. Stacey's cross-cultural study contends that marriage is an institution that attempts the near impossible task of reconciling the goals of domesticity with those of erotic life, and that in the process an extraordinary range of marital arrangements have emerged. Taken together these arguments ask us to consider who marriage serves.

AbstractThe popularity of self‐improvement literature has lead to an abundance of scholarly considerations of the self‐help literature and lifestyle media. This interdisciplinary review article considers the dominant trends in these discussions and suggests four new directions for fruitful inquiry: (1) investigating self‐help literature from the global South and the evolving Asian economies in cross‐cultural comparative analyses; (2) more thoroughly assessing the role of religious movements and discourses in these self‐help discourses and practices; (3) exploring more fully the impact of interactive media on self‐help practices; and (4) continued creative explorations of strategies to transform makeover culture into a broader movement to make over our culture.

The neurodiversity movement emerged as an extension of the disability rights movement to include the those individuals with neurological differences. Micki McGee posits that neurodiversity is also a response to the neoliberalism of the past three decades that has (1) shifted responsibility for individuals with neurological and cognitive challenges back to the family, and (2) fostered a crippling speed-up in our workplaces while simultaneously requiring new levels of sociability and flexibility that render more people debilitated or disabled. The article concludes that demands for the rights of neurologically diverse populations may challenge the very framework of liberal personhood.