Confidence Culture

Consumer culture has always been intimately involved with the disciplining of women’s bodies—whether fashion or advertising or magazines exhorting women to shape up, work out, and do better in everything from appearance to parenting to sexual techniques.

Conducting life through an entrepreneurial spirit, the neoliberal self is said to be hailed by rules that emphasize ambition, calculation, competition, self-optimization, and personal responsibility.

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.

Body confidence—or lack of it—has emerged also as a central public health concern in the last two decades, increasingly shown to be connected to anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and poor physical and mental health more broadly.

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

There appears to be a curious turn from the “self-made woman” of the late 1990s and early 2000s and the millennial Wonder Woman (Amy Cuddy), who was encouraged to airbrush her insecurities and reframe them as confidence and resilience, to celebrating a female subject who foregrounds her pain and vulnerability as a vital asset for success at work.

Lifestyle media center on exhortations to remodel the self and interior life—not simply to become thinner, be better groomed, or have more successful dates, but to make over one’s psychic life or subjectivity to become a “better” version of oneself, that is, confident, happier, more resilient.

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

Lean In advocates individualistic definitions of progress and success, which are inseparable from the historic privileging of heterosexual conduct, whiteness, and middle-classness.