Policing Protest: The Post-Democratic State and the Figure of Black Insurrection

that the U.S. 2020 election was fair and free, or even lose 10 stubborn pounds after going on an ice cream fast for six months, we can, perhaps, change how we feel about it all, if we just manufacture the ‘‘right’’ mindset of confidence. As Organ and Gill note, confidence is an affective technology of self, operating through emotions, feelings, and desires. It works by diverting people’s attention from institutional problems that are hard to solve to individual ones that we think we might be able to influence. For example, if after scrolling through a social media platform replete with fit influencers, we feel dumpy and ugly, messages that say ‘‘confidence is the new sexy,’’ ‘‘love your body,’’ and ‘‘feel confident in your own skin’’ sound right. Who doesn’t want to ‘‘feel comfortable’’ with oneself? But in addition to the fact that the path toward actually feeling better about oneself is not well articulated (how do I feel confident when I don’t feel confident?), these admonitions do nothing to change the root of the problem, which is that most media bodies are unnaturally thin and doctored. Similarly, each chapter carefully explores confidence messaging in a particular sphere: body image, at work, in sex and relationships, in mothering, and in a transnational context. Threaded throughout Confidence Culture are observations about the gendered quality of confidence messaging. In particular, the authors note how confidence messaging appropriates and then waters down feminist goals into something less political and thus less threatening to patriarchy. For example, it devolves equality and liberation to empowerment, sisterhood to friendship, and rage into passion. The authors conclude Confidence Culture by exploring a path ‘‘beyond confidence,’’ and especially the role of social justice in such an endeavor. They reiterate the main paradox of confidence messaging: that no matter how warm, loving, and encouraging it sounds, the foundational assumption of confidence culture is that people, particularly women, are to blame for their problems. The authors note, ‘‘the confidence cult redirects attention from the brutal effects of patriarchal capitalism to women’s ‘selfinflicted wounds’ and their responsibility for healing them . . . . women’s individual ‘toxic baggage’ is treated as self-generated and unconnected to a culture of normalized pathologization, objectification, surveillance, blame, and hate speech directed at women’’ (p. 144). Original and well argued, Confidence Culture is an essential intervention in feminist media scholarship by illuminating a new form of domination politics. To reiterate, contemporary exhortations to confidence are problematic not because the authors (or anyone) believe confidence is bad, but because they encourage individual solutions to social problems. By making visible the manipulations of confidence messaging, the authors have done much to clear some of the confusion it generates and help steer westerners away from platitudes that distract from social change. I highly recommend Confidence Culture to scholars of media, communications, new technologies, feminist and intersectional theory, and to instructors teaching a range of courses in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, especially Women and Media.