Confidence Culture

In Confidence Culture, Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill argue that imperatives directed at women to love your body and believe in yourself imply that psychological blocks rather than entrenched social injustices hold women back. Interrogating the prominence of confidence in contemporary discourse about body image, workplace, relationships, motherhood, and international development, Orgad and Gill draw on Foucaults notion of technologies of self to demonstrate how confidence culture demands of women near-constant introspection and vigilance in the service of self-improvement. They argue that while confidence messaging may feel good, it does not address structural and systemic oppression. Rather, confidence culture suggests that womenalong with people of color, the disabled, and other marginalized groupsare responsible for their own conditions. Rejecting confidence cultures remaking of feminism along individualistic and neoliberal lines, Orgad and Gill explore alternative articulations of feminism that go beyond the confidence imperative.