Confidence Culture

Confidence can thus never be understood as assured or complete but is always a work in progress, requiring continual introspection and labor.

As Micki McGee argues, it was a notion that “fused religious and psychological discourses.… Work on the self—the quest for a path, the invention of a life, or the search for authenticity—is offered as an antidote to the anxiety-provoking uncertainties of a new economic and social order.29 McGee calls the subject that is produced by these discourses

Crucially, this emotionalism and inspirational discourse involve systematically regulating and denouncing “negative” feelings such as hurt, grudge, bitterness, sadness, despair, and (political) anger.

Fundamentally, Lean In calls on women to “internalize the revolution” (the title of the book’s first chapter), that is, to internalize the political project of challenging gender inequality in the workplace by treating both the problem and its solutions as personal, individualized, and psychologically based.

Yet we contend that the versions of feminism deployed in confidence cult(ure) are troublingly individualistic, turning away from structural inequalities and wider social injustices to accounts that foreground psychological change rather than social transformation.

While we concur with this emphasis on neoliberalism’s operation across social life—what Wendy Brown calls its “stealth revolution” across the entire demos—we depart from accounts that regard the self called forth by neoliberalism as purely rational and calculating.53 To this we want to add an understanding of its dynamics at an affective or emotion

The neoliberalization of self-help is marked, too, by a particular affective tone in these texts directed at women. Its emphasis is on optimism, boldness, the right mindset, feeling good, developing the right attitude, do(ing) what you love, and so on. Having the right “emotional style” becomes formulated as an imperative: feel this and you can cha

Thus, Hollis explicitly exhorts women to self-police and censor their negative feelings. Against Beyoncé’s putative bitterness and rudeness—a textbook iteration of the pathologized “angry Black woman”—Hollis establishes the desirable femininity as not angry, not rude, not bitter, and, implicitly, not Black.

Instead of questioning the neoliberal order that created the struggle and pain borne by its subjects—having to work seventeen hours a day, being in precarious employment, being constantly sleep deprived, et cetera—this mode of apprehending and being in the world encourages acceptance of the existing order as the only possible order, or the best of