Sublime

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

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.

Instead of being fed from above a limited diet of standardized cultural products, everyone — not just a minority of highly educated omnivores — can now craft a varied and customized cultural diet from the digital cornucopia. People create these customized diets by sharing the work of “curation” in differentiated niche taste communities. This colle

For example, while, previously, an advertisement showing a woman using dishwashing detergent might have been seen as reinforcing patriarchal expectations and exploiting women in a material sense, after the applied postmodern turn it would be seen as a way of “gendering” domestic tasks—using discourses to legitimize the idea that washing dishes is p

The premise underpinning this ideal is that women suffer from an internal “defect,” namely a “confidence gap,” which holds them back in the world of work. Fixing this (supposed) internal barrier in women is constructed as key to their self-transformation and empowerment and to tackling gender inequality in the workplace more broadly.

digital DIY porn cultures render more sexual realities and possibilities “on/scene.

about erotic innocence that form part of the larger discourse of reproductive futurism: