Confidence Culture: Prof Ros Gill in the headlines

Ros Gill and Shani Orgad’s new book on “Confidence Culture” is whipping up a pre-publication storm in the media. Starting with Financial Times, and followed by The New York Times, Vox and France 24 , as well as El Pais, the Atlantic, The Times and Die Zeit the media has been featuring interviews and reviews on their pages (mostly behind paywalls).

The book is published by Duke University Press.

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 Foucault’s 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 women—along with people of color, the disabled, and other marginalized groups—are responsible for their own conditions. Rejecting confidence culture’s remaking of feminism along individualistic and neoliberal lines, Orgad and Gill explore alternative articulations of feminism that go beyond the confidence imperative.