Abstract
With suspicion and intrigue feminist cultural studies often examines how cultural formations that are familiar and mundane are consequential reproductions of power relations situated in historical inequalities. What might have previously been taken for granted is carefully critiqued. One key example is the perpetuated myth of neoliberalism that ‘when you feel confident, you can do anything’ (p. 46). This ubiquitous exhortation and other messages of female empowerment are taken to task by Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill in their book Confidence Culture (2022). Confidence Culture (2022) emerged from an overflowing collection of examples of confidence discourse and media encountered by the authors, their colleagues, friends and students since the 2010s. While they acknowledge discourses of self-love and self-confidence are not new, Orgad and Gill argue, ‘confident cult(ure)’ is flourishing at a time when mental health is worsening, inequalities are widening, and economic hardship is increasing as people are working longer hours and multiple jobs. This has been further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and erosion of the welfare state. Women are encouraged to look inwardly at their own psyches and away from capitalism and social structures as causational. Once the problem is individualised then begins the intensive labour of transforming the self into a positive and confident individual through disciplined self-monitoring and self-regulation. In chorus with feminists who have elaborated on Michel Foucault’s (1988) ‘technology of the self’, Orgad and Gill are concerned with how ‘confidence culture acts as a powerful dispositif’ (original emphasis, p. 147) and the sweetening of feminism as therapeutic. In a forceful critique of self-help discourses, the authors problematise how feminist politics is being diluted by the psychological self.
Supported by their extensive media and cultural analysis with a focus on discourse, the authors argue confidence is both culture and cult. They conceptualise the term ‘cult(ure)’ to describe how confidence discourse has embedded into Western culture as a new common sense and is cult-like in the way it spreads ‘as an unquestionable article of faith’ (p. 5) to prop up neoliberalism. They further argue that this is highly gendered as the emphasis is on women to change how they feel about themselves through self-regulating and self-monitoring in order to access privileged spaces and material resources. In ‘Confidence at work’ (chapter 2), Orgad and Gill focus their analysis on the popular Anglo-American books that offer advice for women in the corporate sector. In workplace discourse, women are frequently blamed for lacking the confidence to progress, displacing the structures that produce inequalities onto women’s individual psyches. They can only gain enough confidence to close the gender gap through the intensive labour of continuously self-governing, self-managing and self-improving. Similarly, as discussed in chapters 3 and 4, ‘confidence cult(ure)’ is present in discourse that encourages mothers to learn to love themselves despite their imperfections and the relationship advice that calls for self-acceptance. Orgad and Gill argue this abundance of ‘Love Your Body’ (LYB) discourse individualises and trivialises the injurious nature of patriarchal culture.
The authors are critical of how ‘confidence cult(ure)’ encourages women to tolerate, survive and even embrace neoliberalism as the only possible social order through the suppression of ‘negative’ feelings in favour of a positive attitude. Confidence Culture (2022) is a contribution to feminist theory of affect, as Orgad and Gill analyse the phenomenon of ‘confidence cult(ure)’ as an ‘affective technology of the self’ that materialises in multiple ways. For example, feelings such as gratitude are historically femininised as Black women and women of colour in particular are encouraged to restrain their anger as exemplified in Talking Back by bell hooks’ (1989). In turn, Orgad and Gill are suspicious of the ‘new normative ideal of vulnerability’ (p. 72) as it still demands work on the self through psychological techniques, all the while ignoring any structural solutions needed to address the causes of vulnerability such as illness, racism and poverty.
Orgad and Gill emphasise that neoliberalism is intrinsic to ‘confidence cult(ure)’ and feminist ideals are depoliticised as ‘rage’ is reduced to ‘passion’ and ‘equality’ is refigured as ‘empowerment’. Supposedly, ‘confidence cult(ure)’ is feminist, however, as the authors show it is a sabotage of feminist ideas and principles. This version of feminism is repackaged through the guises of being postfeminist, postqueer and postracial that empties out the context and histories to universalise and erase crucial differences (yet again). While the book admittedly focuses on the United Kingdom, the United States, Europe and Australasia, in ‘Confidence without borders’ (chapter 5), they examine the ‘flow of confidence discourse and technologies across and between the global North and global South’ (original emphasis, p. 127). Global South in this context is ‘a placeholder for the conditions of dispossession and survival’ (p. 127) as influenced by Raka Shome (2019). Orgad and Gill argue there is a blurring of difference between girls living in the ‘global North’ and the ‘global South’ through projects that centralise confidence as a solution to inequalities. In similar ways to white saviour volunteerism, ‘confidence cult(ure)’ obscures the histories and violence of colonialism. As argued by the authors throughout, the consequences of ‘confidence cult(ure)’ are it hollows out differences and as such inequalities are decontextualised.
While the authors highlight neoliberal ideals of entrepreneurial success and self-transformation privileges whiteness, heterosexuality and middle-classness, this could be expanded to include how these are also injurious forms of fatphobia (as discussed in the conclusion), transphobia, ablism and ageism. For example, Dan Goodley in his conceptualisation of neoliberal-ablism critiques neoliberalism on the basis that it is ableist as ‘the neoliberal self is an able-bodied entrepreneurial entity’ (Goodley, 2014: 29). Given the argument that the politics of affect is stratified by power relations and ‘confidence cult(ure)’ arose from the dismantling of social structures, there is opportunity to expand their ideas. There is also scope to analyse how confidence messaging that encourages a transformation of the self, affects cultural understandings of dis/ability, aging and transitioning which further inequalities.
The pervasiveness of ‘confidence cult(ure)’ struck me when I was recently listening to a BBC Radio 4 interview with Jennifer Tuckett, founder of the Women in Theatre Lab and Jude Kelly, former artist director of the Southbank Centre (BBC Radio 4, 2023). They discussed Women in Theatre Lab which is a paid ‘pipeline’ to get women working in the theatre (BBC Radio 4, 2023). In response to a question regarding barriers to women entering these careers, Kelly blames the so-called confidence deficit (BBC Radio 4, 2023). Ograd and Gill offer a way to conceptualise this type of commonplace confidence messaging as a contemporary phenomenon born out of neoliberalism that is purposely distracting from structural inequalities. Confidence Culture (2022) is not an intervention in the fields of gender studies and media and cultural studies but rather it adds to existing critiques of Western neoliberal culture and post-feminist media. The originality is in their framing of confidence as cult, and it could be pedagogically appealing to a new generation of students. This book is not an argument against confidence but rather a persuasive feminist critique of ‘confidence cult(ure)’ as a gendered technology of self that is situated within contemporary neoliberalism in the West.
