Confidence Culture

As social and welfare structures that were designed to provide a safety net against social risks and ills are being aggressively dismantled—with the greatest costs of this process inflicted on women, children, people of color, disabled people, and the elderly—confidence emerges as a gendered technology of self, directed predominantly at women and r

which have historically propelled feminism. The appeal of the changes that women are encouraged to make in transforming themselves into confident subjects is that they are (supposedly) small, quick, easy, and, crucially, not disruptive.

Confidence is an individualizing technology inculcating a self-regulating spirit, which works to reframe contemporary issues about social injustice in individual and psychological terms, locating responsibility for, blame for, and solutions to pain and injustice in women.

as Brown puts it, embracing vulnerability is about being seen. In other words, it is a performance. However, rather than demonstrating uninhibited vulnerability, good employees and leaders need to embrace a strategic and controlled performance of vulnerability.

Confidence is offered as a one-size-fits-all solution, disavowing significant differences between and among women and contexts. The problem of low self-esteem is described in strikingly similar terms whether referring to a woman with a body designated as plus-size, a senior professional woman in the corporate workplace, an unemployed single mother,

Many of the lexical features of body confidence messages are here—choice, freedom, rewriting the rules, defying conventions—with images that reinforce these and a soundtrack of the song “Venus” (I’m your fire at your desire). Yet it is striking that Gillette is not trying to free women from pressures to remove body hair but rather attempting to exp

A profound crisis caused by government failure, which sees mothers leaving the workforce and scaling back in droves, is cast as an opportunity to press the “pause button,” which women ought to embrace unapologetically and from which they will emerge “with confidence.”

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