Vulnerability, we argue, has become almost mandatory and authorizes the individualistic psychologized confidence imperative.

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.

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

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.

This critique applies to the confidence culture more broadly, which, as we have argued, proposes ways in which women can positively and constructively develop strategies to change themselves within the existing capitalist and corporate realities they face rather than disrupting and seeking to change those very realities.

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.

noted, expressions of pain and insecurity are key features of commercial body confidence messages—to be glimpsed only briefly before a defiant riposte is blazoned: “My beauty. My say” (Dove); “From self-doubt to self-worth” (L’Oréal); “My can’t stop me now hair” (Pantene). The list goes on. The tone is strikingly similar across brands and

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