Sublime

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.

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.

emotional corporeality is moreover a central element to defining black racial authenticity.

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

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

lingering feminine/affective, rather than feminist, connotations.