Confidence culture and the remaking of feminism

In this paper we explore how confidence works as a technology of self, exhorting women and girls to act upon themselves, and how it is reconfiguring feminist concerns. Our analysis demonstrates how the confidence cult(ure) has materialised in three different sites: discussions about women in the workplace; texts and practices promoting ‘confident mothering’; and contemporary sex and relationship advice. We show that confidence acts as a disciplinary technology of self which is addressed almost exclusively to women and is articulated in highly standardized terms which disavow any difference between and among women. It is an individualising technology which demands intense labour, places the emphasis upon women self-regulating and locates the source of the ‘problems’ and their ‘solutions’ within a newly upgraded form of confident subjectivity, thus rendering insecurity and lack of confidence abhorrent. We then discuss how the confidence culture is deeply implicated in the new luminosity of feminism, and we argue that it contributes to the remaking of feminism in three central ways: 1) by continuing and promoting elements of postfeminist sensibility, yet through celebration rather than repudiation of feminism; 2) through an inclusive address that expunges difference and the possibility of its critique; and 3) by favouring positive affect and outlawing ‘negative’ ‘political’ feelings. We argue that this move, which calls forth a new kind of a ‘cool’ ‘feminist’ subject, is simultaneously political, psychological and aesthetic

The amazing bounce-backable woman: Resilience and the psychological turn in neoliberalism

This article examines the growing prominence accorded to the idea of ‘resilience’ as a regulatory ideal, locating it in the context of a ‘turn to character’ in contemporary culture which we see as part of a wider psychological turn within neoliberalism. Building from discussions of ‘resilience’ as a quality demanded and promoted by public policy in the context of austerity and worsening inequality, we argue that resilience has also emerged as a central term in popular culture in genres such as self-help literature, lifestyle magazines, and reality television, as well as in a burgeoning social media culture focussed on positive thinking, affirmations, and gratitude. It calls on people to be adaptable and positive, bouncing back from adversity and embracing a mind-set in which negative experiences can–and must–be reframed in upbeat terms. The article examines three case studies–women’s magazines, self-help books, and smartphone apps–to explore how resilience is constituted, how it operates, and how it materialises across different sites. We extend existing work by highlighting the classed and gendered dimensions of injunctions to resilience, pointing to the ways that middle-class women are hailed as emblematic ‘bounce-backable’ subjects. We explore how notions of elasticity, inspiration, and affirmation are deployed in ways that systematically outlaw critique or any need for social transformation while inciting a vast range of physical, social and, above all, psychological labours on the part of ‘resilient’ subjects

Evidence of Electron Fractionalization from Photoemission Spectra in the High Temperature Superconductors

In the normal state of the high temperature superconductors Bi_2Sr_2CaCu_2O_{8+delta} and La_{2-x}Sr_{x}CuO_4, and in the related ``stripe ordered'' material La_1.25Nd_0.6Sr_0.15CuO_4, there is sharp structure in the measured single hole spectral function A(k,w) considered as a function of k at fixed small binding energy w. At the same time, as a function of w at fixed k on much of the putative Fermi surface, any structure in A(k,w), other than the Fermi cutoff, is very broad. This is characteristic of the situation in which there are no stable excitations with the quantum numbers of the electron, as is the case in the one dimensional electron gas.Comment: Published versio

Safety valves for mediated female rage in the #MeToo era

In political discourse, popular and media culture, female rage is “having a moment.” More and more women are getting publicly and unapologetically angry, particularly in relation to sexual violence, but also in reaction to other forms of sexism, racism and injustice. Yet, it is also clear that the release of female anger in public culture is uneven ---- in terms of class, race, age, sexuality, disability --- and that powerful mechanisms continue long legacies of pathologizing this anger, situating it as a problem with a woman’s body, her hormones or her mental state. Rage is thus simultaneously “an instrument of patriarchy as well as a potential feminist resource… operating both for and against feminism: visceral, transgressive, galvanizing, and socially constructed” (Signs 2018). In the following short essay, we are interested in the ways in which female anger may become legible as feminist rage, and, conversely, in how the possibilities of rage are undone. We analyse ways in which female rage is allowed to enter the mediated public sphere and in which it is simultaneously contained and disavowed. We start by briefly locating the current expressions of female rage in media and culture within the history of female rage and its prohibition in public. We then present our empirical analysis of one of the early #MeToo ‘flashpoints’ (Sarah Banet-Weiser 2018a) of female rage: the mediation of Hollywood actress Uma Thurman’s anger about sexual violence and coercion

Get Unstuck: Pandemic positivity imperatives and self-care for women

Examining women’s magazines and lifestyle coaching, the article explores how positivity imperatives in contemporary culture call forth a happy, confident, hopeful, and vibrant subject during the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis shows how these positivity imperatives acknowledge stress and difficulty, and at times highlight their gendered impacts, yet nevertheless systematically figure responses and solutions in individual, psychological, and often consumerist terms. The discussion demonstrates how positivity imperatives operate not only through verbal advice but also through visual, embodied, and affective means and through an emphasis on developing new social practices—from holding one’s body differently, to keeping gratitude journals, to cultivating a new virtual persona for online work meetings. The article highlights a profound paradox: in times of a global pandemic that has affected women disproportionally, and when structural injustices and inequalities have been made ever more visible, positivity and individualized self-care interpellations to women flourish, anger is muted, and critiques of structural inequality are largely silenced. Thus, seemingly benign and often undoubtedly well-meaning messages of confidence, calm, and positivity during the pandemic work to buttress a neoliberal imaginary and persistent social inequalities

Weak-coupling phase diagrams of bond-aligned and diagonal doped Hubbard ladders

We study, using a perturbative renormalization group technique, the phase diagrams of bond-aligned and diagonal Hubbard ladders defined as sections of a square lattice with nearest-neighbor and next-nearest-neighbor hopping. We find that for not too large hole doping and small next-nearest-neighbor hopping the bond-aligned systems exhibit a fully spin-gapped phase while the diagonal systems remain gapless. Increasing the next-nearest-neighbor hopping typically leads to a decrease of the gap in the bond-aligned ladders, and to a transition into a gapped phase in the diagonal ladders. Embedding the ladders in an antiferromagnetic environment can lead to a reduction in the extent of the gapped phases. These findings suggest a relation between the orientation of hole-rich stripes and superconductivity as observed in LSCO.Comment: Published version. The set of RG equations in the presence of magnetization was corrected and two figures were replace

Finite temperature spectral function of Mott insulators and CDW States

We calculate the low temperature spectral function of one-dimensional incommensurate charge density wave (CDW) states and half-filled Mott insulators (MI). At $T=0$ there are two dispersing features associated with the spin and charge degrees of freedom respectively. We show that already at very low temperatures (compared to the gap) one of these features gets severely damped. We comment on implications of this result for photoemission experiments.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, published versio

The ‘stay-at-home’ mother, postfeminism and neoliberalism: Content analysis of UK news coverage

This article analyzes the construction in the UK media of the ‘stay-at-home mother’, a maternal figure who received increasing visibility during the recession and its aftermath. Based on a content analysis of UK national newspaper coverage of stay-at-home mothers (2008–2013), this article argues that the stay-at-home mother emerges from its press coverage as a neoliberal postfeminist subject. On the one hand, the coverage complicates claims about antifeminist backlash and women’s harking back to passive femininity. On the other hand, it fails significantly to undermine maternal femininity’s entanglement with neoliberalism, and reinforces the process described by McRobbie as ‘disarticulation’, by separating between middle-class mothers and working-class mothersLSE Seed Fun