Exhaustion as evidence

Abstract

This essay examines the contemporary normalisation of exhaustion within feminist, activist and academic spaces, arguing that burnout is frequently misdiagnosed as an individual failure rather than understood as a structural condition. Drawing on Black feminist thought, disability justice frameworks and critiques of neoliberal governance, the essay reframes exhaustion as evidence of institutional and political arrangements that depend on continuous labour, responsiveness and productivity. It traces how neoliberal responsibilisation shifts structural strain onto individuals through discourses of resilience, self-care and boundary management, while leaving extractive institutional logics intact. For racialised, migrant and disabled subjects in particular, burnout emerges not as episodic overwork but as patterned depletion produced through structural capture, where individuals remain materially tied to institutions they recognise as unjust. The essay further interrogates the political limits of rest, questioning whether rest alone can disrupt systems organised around extraction. By situating exhaustion as an analytic signal rather than a personal deficit, the essay calls for a collective and structural rethinking of labour, care and resistance within feminist and academic cultures.