Confidence Culture

Crucially, this emotionalism and inspirational discourse involve systematically regulating and denouncing “negative” feelings such as hurt, grudge, bitterness, sadness, despair, and (political) anger.

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.

Fundamentally, Lean In calls on women to “internalize the revolution” (the title of the book’s first chapter), that is, to internalize the political project of challenging gender inequality in the workplace by treating both the problem and its solutions as personal, individualized, and psychologically based.

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

A postfeminist sensibility is one in which feminist ideas are said to have been “taken into account” already, obviating the need for radical social transformation along gender lines.14 In recent years this has mutated from outright repudiation of feminism into something more subtle: a sense of the “obviousness” of the importance of feminism, alongs

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

Too often confidence cult(ure) messages are culpable in this, presenting disability as an individual obstacle to be overcome through character strengths such as determination, confidence, and resilience and obscuring how different forms of disability are a product of and response to neoliberalism.23

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

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