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.

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.

Hyperbolic claims about how “bold,” “brave,” “different,” and “radical” current advertising campaigns or fashion spreads are provide evidence of how tightly normative beauty standards are policed, so that even a minute departure or deviation attracts the label “fierce” or “badass,” such as the commentary on the “no-makeup selfie,” which depicts it

Indeed, perhaps the most significant force of lifestyle media is the way it systematically refigures individuals as self-governing subjects, “as the agents of their destinies, who achieve goals of health, happiness, productivity, security and wellbeing through their individual choices and self-care practices.”49 Working on one’s own self-confidence

democratization of the types of men and women we see in aspirational positions.