Confidence Culture

Our critique, then, proposes not to “take down” confidence as an idea or ideal but rather to look at what the confidence cult does: how it operates performatively, what it brings into being and renders visible, and what it obscures or makes unintelligible.

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

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

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

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.

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,

More recently, Meg Henderson and Anthea Taylor discussed the “neoliberalization” of self-help (considered further below).41 In this iteration the feminist ideals of the 1980s and 1990s are transformed with even greater individualism and more emphasis on producing subjects “better adjusted to neoliberalism.” They chart how a focus on feminist consci

These exhortations have become ubiquitous across so many different domains of social and cultural life, and with such striking homogeneity, that they have come to constitute a kind of unquestioned common sense. The self-evident value of confidence—and particularly female self-confidence—has been placed beyond debate, treated as an unexamined cultur

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.