A profound crisis caused by government failure, which sees mothers leaving the workforce and scaling back in droves, is cast as an opportunity to press the “pause button,” which women ought to embrace unapologetically and from which they will emerge “with confidence.”

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.

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

is, body confidence messages require a transformation, and this time not only a physical “makeover.” As we noted in the introduction to the book, the transformation imperative extends to subjectivity, to inner life, to the mindset and feelings of individuals addressed. Interestingly this “mental makeover” is offered as a promise of happiness and al

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.

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 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.

Many of the lexical features of body confidence messages are here—choice, freedom, rewriting the rules, defying conventions—with images that reinforce these and a soundtrack of the song “Venus” (I’m your fire at your desire). Yet it is striking that Gillette is not trying to free women from pressures to remove body hair but rather attempting to exp

While we concur with this emphasis on neoliberalism’s operation across social life—what Wendy Brown calls its “stealth revolution” across the entire demos—we depart from accounts that regard the self called forth by neoliberalism as purely rational and calculating.53 To this we want to add an understanding of its dynamics at an affective or emotion