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.

Above all, in locating the cause of social injustice in a confidence deficit, it calls for women to undertake intensive work on the self, from changing the way they look, communicate, and occupy space to psychological work on building a more confident inner life through practices of gratitude, affirmations, self-friending, and more. The confidence

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.

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

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.

is, body confidence messages require a transformation, and this time not only a physical “makeover.” As we noted in the introduction to the book, the transformation imperative extends to subjectivity, to inner life, to the mindset and feelings of individuals addressed. Interestingly this “mental makeover” is offered as a promise of happiness and al

Perhaps most significantly, confidence programs for women are frequently framed as feminist interventions, positioned as a way of overcoming inequality.

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

As well as being thoroughly enmeshed in market (and governmental) logics, body confidence is intimately entangled with individualist and neoliberal values. It becomes positioned as a choice and a commodity—something one can pledge as if it were entirely a matter of will: “Today I pledge to be confident,” as Dove’s Be Real campaign advocates.