Rest Cure versus Rest Tour: The Queer Routes of White Women’s Health

Abstract This article explores how queer feminisms of the first wave relied on white supremacism and US exceptionalism to contest medical discourses about neurasthenia and sexual inversion. In particular, the author analyzes theories of women’s health, physical mobility, and sensitivity to civilization advanced by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, particularly in her short story “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” as well as by members of the Women’s Rest Tour Association (WRTA), a late nineteenth-century collectivity of women committed to traveling abroad without men. Constellating Gilman’s contestation of S. Weir Mitchell’s rest cure with Mitchell’s writings, as well as the archival records of the WRTA’s innovative rest tour, reveals the roots of white women’s self-care practices and their biopolitical investments. We also gain insight into how white queer communities have long leveraged discourses of family, race, and “civilized” cultural inheritance to forge a space for themselves and their loved ones within mainstream US culture. These insights are particularly valuable in our current historical moment as we continue to suffer the consequences of and learn from the immobilities experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic, and as we continue to grapple with ongoing threats to women’s health and reproductive freedom.