Confidence Culture, by Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022. 241 pp. $25.95 paper. ISBN: 1478017600.
Confidence is magical. Or at least, modern discourses make it seem that way. Body positive music videos, tear-jerking Dove ads, and speeches by Megan Markle to South African peoples all tell the same story: the only thing standing between you and your dream life is your lack of confidence. What wonderful news! Confidence can’t be too difficult to muster up, right? Don’t be so sure, writes Orgad and Gill. Confidence culture is ostensibly powerful, but not everyone can be a member of the cult. Women have to work hard to achieve confidence, they have to practice it and labor for it to reap its rewards. But even with constant effort and maintenance, confidence is not readily accessible to all kinds of women. Women of color, queer women, disabled women, trans women, plus-sized women, and immigrant women all have to perform even more work to meet the standards of power, poise, and perfect femininity that were molded to fit white, straight, able-bodied, cis women. Thus, the main issue of confidence culture comes into focus: if confidence is the key to all of women’s problems (as pop culture promises), why is confidence only accessible to a very lucky few?
This is the question that Orgad and Gill approach in their new book, Confidence Culture. The book highlights the pressures on women to maintain a confident worldview by turning a critical eye to confidence culture discourse, elucidating the pitfalls of it, and exhibiting a myriad of media examples. The authors were inspired to write this book by the women around them: Orgad and Gill witnessed the growth in self-love discourse in the media and saw how the women in their lives clamored to achieve it, but inevitably, could not. What is it that makes confidence so slippery?
The main five chapters of the text work through five domains where confidence culture is most dominant in modern social discourses. These five domains are women’s bodies, the workplace, intimate relationships, mothering, and international affairs. In each area, confidence culture places undue burden on women by forcing them to labor to love their bodies, labor to act as men in the office, project flawless femininity in romantic relationships, teach their children to be confident future citizens, and stride confidently past instances of past and present imperialism across international borders.
In these five chapters, the burden of confidence cultivation is an important theme. In chapter one, the ways that women are forced to practice self surveillance to maintain their appearance and earn their confidence is impactful. In chapter two, gender inequality in the workplace and the lack of female representation in positions of leadership are blamed on women, insinuating that if women could be more confident in themselves, they could take control of the workforce. In chapter three on mothering, women have to teach their children to be confident, and when they are not confident, blame is ascribed to the mothers for not teaching confidence correctly. In chapter four on intimate relationships, women are asked to maintain the quality of their romantic partnerships through intense emotional labor, and if the relationships fail, the women are blamed for their inability to channel undeniable feminine sexuality. In chapter five on colonialsm and slavery across the globe, the low levels of female confidence are equated with the underlying reasons for global, systemic oppression. Combining the five domains, confidence culture insists that if women could just be confident enough in every aspect of their lives, they would solve all of their problems. Thus the paradox of confidence culture is born; no one is perfect, but women need to be or else they will be blamed for all societal ills. The onus is placed on the individuals to fix the world’s issues through constant labor for a positive self-opinion, all the while an impossible set of obstacles keep women from being confident: the world profits off of their insecurities, belittles and demeans them, and oppresses them heavily on a worldwide scale. By performing a thematic content analysis of media examples in these five domains, the authors dive into the inner workings of the cult of confidence and reveal the pain it's causing many women of color, queer women, and disabled women. To conclude their findings, Orgad and Gill discuss the possible reclamation of confidence in feminism, and restate that the current world of confidence culture requires overhaul to rehabilitate the women who have been damaged by its current teachings.
The argument I described above peppered the book and was dutifully supported by the examples included. The clear format of the text and matter-of-fact writing style made this an informative and straightforward read. However, the argument did not feel grounded in a historical context or a philosophical landscape. The large (if not excessive) number of examples supporting the authors’ thesis displayed the commendable number of resources used to inform this book. These primary source examples were helpful, but Orgad and Gill’s work could have benefited from more secondary sources to establish their academic theories. Their ideas, while interesting, at times felt unfounded in past literature and unconnected to current discourses. Theory fell to the wayside as Orgad and Gill included quote after quote from advertisements, songs, movies, and other primary sources to illustrate their points, rather than situate them. This book, though educational and easy to read, exists suspended somewhere between journalistic inquiry and academic research. What would Black feminists say about confidence culture? What would Foucault say about hegemony in female relationships? What do we already know about Marxist critiques of classist consumerism? Answers to any of these questions (or a number of others) could have aided the contextualization of Orgad and Gill’s work.
However, what Confidence Culture lacked in traditional academic density, it made up for in accessibility for a myriad of audiences. The reader does not have to see themselves as belonging in the ivory tower to read and learn from this book. It is easy to imagine future activists of generation Z finding inspiration in this text and feeling seen by the authors; valuable ends that should not be underestimated.
Overall, Confidence Culture was an enjoyable and punchy read with much to offer an unfolding world of media and popular activism.
