Paper short abstract:

Video art installation

Paper long abstract:

This project interrogates how digital wellness cultures, such as essential oils companies and their peer-to-peer distributors, engage gendered marketing, labor, and trauma to obscure systemic oppression. The emotional and relational labor of essential oils distributors compels women to look toward essential oils as a viable medical intervention by leveraging women’s distrust with medical establishments and hardship produced by intersecting structural inequalities. Women are hooked in by promises of essential oils offering silver-bullet solutions to complex problems stemming from inequitable social systems. These promises range from arguing that essential oils release embodied trauma stemming from spousal abuse, to claiming that essential oils are a pathway to fulfilling “divine feminine” energy manifested as subservience and submission to patriarchal domination. My design intervention features digital video content collaging together captioned TikTok and YouTube videos of essential oil distributors making these promises, accompanied by discordant, glitchy audio to capture digital wellness cultures’ distorted truths.