Rosie Hancock: 0:05

Hi everyone. This is Uncommon Sense from the Sociological Review Foundation. We are the home for sociological curiosity and a charity dedicated to getting sociology, in the most expensive sense, out to the world – far beyond academia – and maybe changing it for the better, and this podcast is a big part of that mission. I'm Rosie Hancock in Leipzig, in Germany. Alexis is not with us for this one, so I am going solo on this and it feels appropriate to acknowledge that I feel a little bit vulnerable in, in being alone today. With me is Shani Orgad, a feminist researcher at the London School of Economics in the UK and a Professor in the Department of Media and Communications there. Today, we're going to be talking about, as I've just alluded to, vulnerability, which Shani's been writing about recently. But we're going to do that kind of by way of thinking about confidence culture, and that was the title of Shani's co-authored book with Rosalind Gill that casts a critical eye on imperatives directed at women to love your body and believe in yourself, seeing them in a sociological light rather than a psychological or an individual one. Shani is also the co-editor with Belinda Steffan of the Sociological Review Monograph that came out earlier this year on Reimagining Menopause, and hopefully we'll have a moment to chat about that. So, hi Shani.

Shani Orgad: 1:38

Hello. Thank you for having me.

Rosie Hancock: 1:40

You know, I thought maybe we could start talking about, a little bit about confidence first, and I was wondering if you could reflect for us on the kind of confidence that you need, let's say, like have you had to develop confidence for doing these sorts of podcasts? Because I know you've done heaps and heaps of them, and I'm curious to know about your own approach to confidence.

Shani Orgad: 2:02

That's a great question. I want to start by saying that my work on confidence and the Confidence Culture book is a co-authored book with my dear colleague and friend Rosalind Gill, and it's a question, funnily enough, that we were kind of discussing between ourselves during the work on the book, but also post the publication of the book, when we started getting a lot of interview requests. I think it's a great question in so far as while we're critiquing this culture and the imperative to be confident and all these tips, self-help and self-empowerment tips, we are not immune to them, and so yes, I do need this confidence, and we would often offer it to each other. But that's the fundamental kind of sociological curiosity we had about this issue of confidence is that we're not outside it or beyond it, but actually, we are compelled often to precisely kind of embrace confidence or try to kind of follow those tips. And at the same time, we're very much critical of the way they work and the reason they work also in such gendered ways, as well as racialised ways and other ways. So, and then, funnily enough, of course, practice makes it better but I think there is something quite fundamental about kind of needing this confidence and I find myself also often sitting, particularly with my female students, you know, giving them these tips, say, before their PhD vivas, yeah. When you enter the room, hold your body straight. All those kind of tips that are in some ways superficial and some ways very much kind of manufacturing confidence, as many gurus and experts of confidence would kind of encourage you to to do, like Amy Cuddy, for instance, the American psychologist. But you know, similarly, I can't tell you that I don't sometimes try myself to fake it so I make it. So, that's my honest response and I think that is exactly also what we were trying to capture with what we call ambivalent critique, where you are ambivalent in so far as you are implicated in this culture, but you are also critical of it and the way in which it works to particularly exacerbate inequalities and to fix, as it were, the woman rather than the world.

Rosie Hancock: 4:46

Yeah, I love this word ambivalent critique because it feels like, it actually feels like something of a sociological hazard. Or, in that we're in these systems and yet we're critical of them, right? Like we know how the sausage is made, but we can't get out of the sausage factory.

Shani Orgad: 5:09

Well, I'm vegetarian, so.

Rosie Hancock: 5:10

Yeah, actually so am I to be honest.

Shani Orgad: 5:11

Funny that you went to this metaphor.

Rosie Hancock: 5:12

I know. But I'm really curious, so this book that you co-authored with Rosalind Gill – Confidence Culture – it came out in 2022, but obviously, you were, you kind of would have been inspired to write it and and been in the process of writing it some time before that. And so I'm curious, when you did start working on the idea of confidence what was it that you were seeing in the world? Like, could you give us some examples of kind of observations that led to your book?

Shani Orgad: 5:39

So, Rosalind and I were actually working on different areas. I'd say 2015/16 is when we started thinking about it. So, Ros was working in the area of intimate relationships, body image, body positivity. I was then working on my previous sociological project, which looked at particularly women who left work in the context of becoming mothers. We had a lot of conversations. We're also very fortunate to live very close to each other, and during the pandemic we would kind of do endless number of rounds of our local park. So we had a lot of time to chat, and we started noticing proliferation of imperatives, both discursive but also visual tropes, that were strikingly similar across those quite distinct domains. And once we noticed it, we saw it everywhere. So, we saw it in the music industry, you know, at the time it was Demi Lovato's"Sorry, Not Sorry", confident, and it was about certain poses, you know, what we came to call the confidence pose and you, you'd see it in, in lots of adverts, you know, with women holding their hands on their, on the waist, on the hips, you know, the what Amy Cuddy calls the Wonder Woman pose. And also discursively we start seeing very similar language across really different fields, but also different genres. So, for instance, in policy-related reports around, say, girls' confidence, you would see things like girls are their own worst enemies, and they're doing it themselves. And then you'd see an advert, yeah, that tells you you are your own worst enemy, love yourself, feel comfortable in your body and so on. And so once we started noticing these kind of striking similarities, we literally started, we had what we called the confidence basket, where we'd tear magazine articles, adverts, we'd take lots of snapshots on phones and screenshots. And at the time, I remember around 2019/20, we wondered if it was just like a short trend, but it actually showed no signs of abating. And in fact, only yesterday I saw a big kind of advert for a health product, kind of a natural health product, and it says, "Do you have the confidence to take that no filter selfie?". And it shows, of course, two young women taking their own selfie. If you only take this vitamin, you supposedly will have the confidence to take that no filter selfie. So, this idea also that in the current highly mediated and social media world, women in particular need that confidence to be able to post their, quote unquote, no filter selfies. And I think the timing is important, as you say, we located in a convergence of a couple of important processes and events. One is, I think, it's important that it's post the financial crisis. It was a very significant moment that gave rise to this new common sense, if you wish. And in the UK, of course, there was strong, strong austerity culture, right, that distinctively targeted women as responsible parents and citizens and so on, and then of course COVID hit women particularly hard. And so in this context of structural failures, individuals and particularly women have been called on to cultivate these qualities and dispositions of resilience, of greed, of passion, of confidence, right, in order to survive. So, that's part of the paradox. It's precisely as social and welfare structures and networks are unravelling, it's precisely then that when the greatest costs are inflicted on women, but also on the disabled, on children, on people of colour, that confidence emerges as what we call, after Foucault, this gendered technology of the self, yeah, as this kind of quick fix and solution. And I think the other really important thing in terms of the time is it was a moment where the kind of intensification of work and overwork culture started imploding. This kind of fetishisation of working round the clock, and that was an important also context within which a lot of the confidence messages that came out, championed perhaps then in 2013 by Sheryl Sandberg in Lean In, were about women and their kind of imperative to be confident at work. And I'd say the third and really important thing is feminism and what our colleague Sarah Banet-Weiser called popular feminism. This kind of resurgence, reemergence of feminist discourses that really were instrumental for the emergence of this new common sense, where women need to be confident. And again, very much popular feminism is a form of feminism that turns away from diagnosing structural issues and locates both the problem and the responsibility for resolving the problem in women as individuals, which is what confidence culture does.

Rosie Hancock: 11:08

Okay, so the confidence culture manifests in discourse, so it's the stuff that we see in advertising and kind of media messages, and it's really kind of caused by some changes that were happening in society, but it nonetheless sort of is targeted at women specifically and it really, as you just said, locates the problem and the solution in the individual. So if that's, if, if that, if that's kind of, I mean, that's clearly a gross simplification.

Shani Orgad: 11:35

I just add, if I can, that it's not just discourses, and I think it's important. It's, it's visual as well. It materialises in a lot of visual tropes, but it's also crucially about how you act, so it's about practices, and how you feel. A really important aspect that we highlight is it's not just about discourses. It's about the affective. It's about directing you to feel in certain ways, yeah, and to believe in yourself, to love yourself. It is a discourse in, in so far as that's what it tells you to do, but the way it operates, it's really very much operates through the emotional level.

Rosie Hancock: 12:19

And so, you know, how do these, this, the tropes, this imperative if you will, kind of play out intersectionally? I mean, we've, we've talked about that it's, it's very gendered, but earlier you mentioned about sort of racial dynamics as well, and I'm curious about any class dynamics that might be at play.

Shani Orgad: 12:36

Yeah, so I think I would start by saying that still in our work, when we observed and we amassed this confidence basket, the idealised confident subject is still very much, I would say, the White middle class woman, yeah. So, she kind of embodies the kind of ideal, ideal confident subject. So it is racialised and classed in these ways that is actually kind of exclusionary, but in fact, again, over time we have seen it be expanded and interestingly, also I think confidence culture builds on and rides on previous movements, including, you know, LGBTQ, kind of racial justice movement, so it kind of capitalises on their discourses and their success to make a case for confidence. But in this process, we show in the book what happens is what we call hollow diversity. It kind of hollows out the meaning of the fundamental fight for justice that underpins these movements and these calls, because it's ultimately all about, you know, striking the right pose, and it doesn't really engage with the structural and social issues and the change that they require. They again very much located in the individual, but also trivialises often the pain and the hurt that it involves, because it often tells women and particularly women of colour or women who are disabled, it's all in your head, you know. If you only overcome these kind of voices in your head, you can be that confident, kind of resilient person and so on. And it ignores the fundamental ways in which intersectionality actually disadvantages women across different axes, as you mentioned, of class, not just gender, of sexuality, of race and so on. So yeah, so intersectionality kind of operates in this way, and I think one particular, particular kind of aspect we, we discuss in the book is also around body positivity and the ways in which body size has become this kind of site for body confidence, but again in very problematic ways that supposedly and in some ways kind of overcome or call to kind of battle shaming and so on, but then also reinforces a lot of these kind of really problematic intersectional politics.

Rosie Hancock: 15:29

Yeah, so I just want to quickly sort of, I guess, define intersectionality, and so it's really just the idea that any given person is going to experience phenomena differently. So, so a woman who is say from a South Asian migrant background and is queer is going identity categories relate and overlap, and then affect how they experience social, the social world. Yes, yeah. So, it's somewhat related to this idea of intersectionality, I am curious about, is confidence

Shani Orgad: 16:18

Yeah, and crucially how it will disadvantage them. culture a phenomena that is exclusive to the Global North? It seems like, like culture is global in a way, and so I'm curious about is this one of the things that we see everywhere in the world, or does, is it playing out kind of more obviously in the north, Global North? We have a whole chapter which we call"Confidence without Borders", where we actually look at the ways in which these discourses and imperatives travel to the Global South or global majority. But again in, in really both problematic and superficial ways, partly because they are done by either international corporations, yeah, and so you know we look at, for instance, the the campaign of sanitary products, like Always to Saudi Arabia, and the way it supposedly kind of takes into account and situates it within local cultures, but basically reverberates very, very similar discourses. But also through international development initiatives and the ways in which the whole kind of, particularly girl and women's empowerment in the Global South has been implemented often very much centred on women becoming, say, entrepreneurs, which you know is not to say is a bad thing in and of itself, but along the lines would often ignore again the structural issues and make then any failure of a woman to become entrepreneur her own failure. So there's a whole chapter where we kind of grapple with the ways in which these discourses and these imperatives have been also kind of, if you wish, imported. But also, following the book, we had some kind of meetings and, and presentations where we heard interesting also alternatives to this idea of confidence as the only way forward. When we can kind of perhaps find it hard to think outside confidence, but perhaps there's other dispositions or qualities to value that are not necessarily about confidence, yeah.

Rosie Hancock: 18:50

Yeah, and, and so, are you saying that you sort of saw those coming from the global majority?

Shani Orgad: 18:55

That was again, that wasn't the part of the book, but in conversations about the book later, in presentations we'd give and so on, women would sometimes come and say, actually, you know, for me in my own context, local context, a cultural context, confidence isn't the thing. For instance, it's sometimes about collective resilience rather than personal confidence, yeah, what's, what's been valued, what's been kind of promoted, what's been seen as the key to women's happiness, success? Whereas fundamentally in the Global North and in the western context, it is, and in the neoliberal context crucially, yeah, it is very much about self confidence, yeah, as as a common sense that is very hard to question because who doesn't want to be self confident? And it's not that we want to argue to say we don't want women to be self confident, quite the contrary, right. It's not about taking down confidence altogether. It's about questioning, in sociological terms, the work it does, you know, how it works productively, but also can work very dangerously to put the blame on women and to reinforce inequalities and crucially to let off institutions, organisation off the hook, yeah, because again, it's ultimately about you taking responsibility of your own and overcoming your, quote unquote, confidence deficit, rather than thinking perhaps you are in an institution that is culpable in producing this lack of confidence and you live in a society that tells women they have to improve themselves and work on themselves.

Rosie Hancock: 20:45

I mean, so speaking about a confidence deficit, that seems like, that seems like the ideal moment to pivot towards vulnerability actually, because you've recently been writing about vulnerability, including a piece that you published in 2024 titled Posting vulnerability on LinkedIn, and I'd love to hear about this. Perhaps we can start with what is this idea of a turn to vulnerability? Why is it happening? And like, why LinkedIn?

Shani Orgad: 21:16

Your question has two parts. I'll start with the first one, which is something that did emerge as we were working on confidence culture, and we started noticing the proliferation of incitements that seemed apparently contradictory, and they were all about embracing your imperfections, you know, and there were popular songs about your imperfect perfections or perfect imperfections, whatever that was, and it seemed like a reverse move, and, you know, books like How to Fail that became very popular. And crucially at the time the, quote unquote, vulnerability guru Brené Brown has been all preaching all business leaders to show vulnerability and to encourage their employees to be vulnerable, and it was all about vulnerable leadership and so on and so forth. And also, more and more celebrities, again particularly women celebrities, you know, Lena Dunham, Arianna Huffington, Michelle Obama, were coming out and confessing their imposter syndrome, you know, and all their kind of vulnerabilities and so on. So we, we noticed that as we were working on confidence and it seemed to be a reverse move. But the more we looked into it, again, we actually realised that in some ways women were required to do both, yeah, to be confident and vulnerable at the same time, and that this embrace of vulnerability in many ways furthered the imperative to look inward again and look and work on yourself, yeah, rather than thinking about what are the structural sources of vulnerability. You know, there was no talk about poverty, racism, sexism. And the other thing that struck us is that vulnerability seemed at the time, that was before I worked on my LinkedIn piece, it seemed still, especially within celebrity culture, allowed so long as you would confess it when you crossed to the other side. So it was about kind of let me give you an interview, how I suffered from imposter syndrome, I'm no longer there, yeah, so it was about this kind of transition you made. And again, the commandment also to to be vulnerable was profoundly gendered. So, there were kind of business leaders that embraced it at the time, but the enthusiastic recipients were often women. That kind of led me later to think about LinkedIn, fundamentally because vulnerability at work has become a really significant site discursively. Again, I mentioned Brené Brown, but also, you know, at this time the CEO and chairman of Goldman Sachs, Apple CEO, all kind of were calling for vulnerability at work and so on. And it struck me in my previous work when I interviewed women who quit their very successful jobs how often they spoke about hiding their vulnerability at work. I was hearing it from people I mentor again, more often women than not, and this coincided with something that seemed really strange when I first encountered it, which is LinkedIn, the platform of today what 1.3 billion users globally, which is the paradigmatic self-promotion, yeah, platform where you are, you ought to always come and say, "I'm thrilled to announce that", and so much so that also LinkedIn has particular articles where they advise you how to post, what kind of images to post. So it was all very much about enthusiastic, polished selves. Suddenly, I started noticing, especially post-George Floyd and the pandemic, more and more posts that on the face of it seemed really inconsistent and almost antithetical to what LinkedIn was about, and these were posts where people came and said, I'm in pain, I was sacked, I'm burnt out, sharing their vulnerability often in quite, in lengthy posts. And later, more and more I also realised and saw were accompanied often by images of vulnerability. So, with no makeup, worn out, tired. During COVID and later afterwards, more and more people on LinkedIn were posting images from hospitals, and this really made me curious to think about what's happening here and and how does vulnerability materialise on LinkedIn and why?

Alice Bloch: 26:24

Hi, it's Alice here. I make Uncommon Sense. Thanks for coming here to listen to Shani Orgad talking to us about confidence, vulnerability and really how they relate and what the imperative to seem these things – a pressure that's put on some of us more than others – tells us about society. If you're enjoying this, you might want to listen to our episodes on Privilege with Shamus Khan, where he talks about the notion of ease. Or maybe you should listen to Burnout with Hannah Proctor, where we contrast mainstream ideas around that term with a more political take focused on activism and a historical take too. For now, though, here's where I remind you that the Sociological Review Foundation is, as ever, a charity. We champion sociology as a really important tool for understanding, but also changing the world. We're not gatekeepers. We are a place for everyone, and we always say you don't have to be a sociologist to think like one. And well, you also do not have to be a sociologist to support this show. If you like what you hear, perhaps you find it useful in teaching or in your own study, or maybe it's just good fuel for conversations with friends and family, please consider donating to us. Just search Donorbox Sociological Review. You'll find that page in our show notes, and whatever you contribute will directly support the making of this show. Anyway, back now to Shani Orgad. We'll pick up on her telling Rosie about how she started analysing the various posts that she spotted on LinkedIn, where it struck her that people were posting about their vulnerability on a platform that really is meant to be about self-promotion.

Rosie Hancock: 28:03

Even men?

Shani Orgad: 30:45

No, so again, this is very gendered. It was also mainly women there. And the other one that was even more, it's what, what Ahmed actually calls the fragile body. Again, bodies in hospitals, in you know images of abused bodies sometimes, and this really it seems quite a radical diversion from LinkedIn, kind of what we would call visual regime. Yeah, this, this kind of, that's characterised by these portrayals of healthy, able, confident bodies. These were like full broken bodies. And the third one was, was more kind of a mockery and playful and subversive posts that were particularly poking at the overwork culture, and more specifically at LinkedIn kind of very aggressive self-promotional imperative. The one I like best is, I've just seen a few of them in the context of the really, really disturbing cuts in universities, now more and more academics are now posting about sacking and cuts in universities. So, people use this kind of formulaic phrase of I'm excited, you know, I'm terribly thrilled to announce that, so they use that and then they said that I was just made redundant.

Rosie Hancock: 32:18

Yeah.

Shani Orgad: 32:19

And I really found these kind of posts really, really interesting in that they precise, they, they kind of deliberately comment critically on this hyper positive, polished, enthusiastic, and, and fake, yeah, culture which pretends that we are all living in times that are not precarious, that are not rife with inequalities.

Rosie Hancock: 32:46

Yeah, I'm so curious that you mentioned precarity here because I was curious about the link between precarity and vulnerability. Like, is vulnerability a sociological term, or is, is precarity kind of the sociological synonym in a sense, like what's the relationship between these two things? Because it seems like vulnerability is individualised, but precarity is about the structure.

Shani Orgad: 33:11

Yeah. Well, to me, that's what Charles Wright Mills called the sociological imagination, where we need to connect personal troubles and what he calls the public issues of the milieu, right? So one of, I think, the public issues or the, the social forces of our times is precarity and the ways in which it shapes people's most intimate experiences and lives is often through vulnerability. Vulnerability is partly, I think, the vocabulary we've So I think you're absolutely right, and, and to me, it's really productive to think about the way they are connected and the way that, again to go back to these posts, I call them vulnerable posts but I think, you know, if we work with, with the sociological imagination, with Mills, it's also an opportunity to rethink the precarious conditions, yeah.

Rosie Hancock: 34:17

It strikes me that there might be some rules to the game, to the game of vulnerability here, right? Like, do men post themselves crying and the answer was like, no. So, like, do some people not get the rules, they don't get it right. They perhaps don't move on from vulnerability. It sounds like you were saying that you, that there's a whole genre where vulnerability is sort of used as the foil that you have now overcome. So, if you stick with the vulnerability for too long, is there a cost to that? I'm, I'm, I'm so curious about the rules and how people are supposed to learn this stuff.

Shani Orgad: 34:52

Yeah, I think it's a fantastic question and, you know, I should admit I haven't, I think it would be maybe another study, but I think it's question I really raise about who is allowed to be vulnerable and how long for right. These were dimensions that were in some ways impossible to infer from the data so I kind of limited myself but I, but I think there is a fundamental question of who can afford to be vulnerable and what it can cost you. So, I think it's a very, very selective turn that addresses particular people and affords particular people in particular context to be vulnerable, also temporally in a way that is contained. You can't be on all the time vulnerable.

Rosie Hancock: 35:35

Yeah, I mean, I'm curious, you you wrote an article a while ago now – so sorry for, for bringing this one up – from, from 2009 on the concept of the survivor, and I found that really fascinating. And in it, you, you have this idea that trauma is both ubiquitous and, and use the term an "envied wound" in contemporary society, and, and that made me wonder, like, we've been talking about the, I guess, the costs of doing vulnerability wrong, incorrectly. But is being vulnerable also something that you are rewarded for and kind of by whom as well?

Shani Orgad: 36:15

Yeah, I think, and there's been a lot of writing since I wrote this article about the kind of, you know, culture or cult of victimhood and the ways in which different groups and different people compete for the kind of victim status and the victim title, but I think again it's really crucial to, to be sensitised to the ways in which it often plays out to reinforce the privilege and the resources that the powerful already have, rather than necessarily allow recognition of people who claim victimhood in contexts where they are anyway unheard. So yeah, and I'm glad you brought the survivor because it's, you know, we, I think all academics we all have the kind of pieces that are really dear to our heart and that's something I've written very, very, relatively early in my career. But I still kind of, I'm very proud of this piece, but also kind of, in many ways, see my work, my work has evolved and, and has in dialogue still with this piece and with the ways in which, yeah, survivorhood and victimhood have emerged as such central cultural categories. But, you know, powerful leaders, male leaders, are also claiming to be victims today, yeah, or survivors, and use the, use this to their advantage. So yeah, so I, I don't, you know, I, I don't know if I've answered your question, but it's, it's kind of, yeah, I think it's a very generative area that, that is continuing to kind of evolve and I think has become even more pronounced post-COVID in a world that is so rife with both, you know, inequalities, with war, where these kind of categories are so alive, and also with, with digital media and social media that I think can make this competition of victims or survivors so very visible, but also quite brutal and aggressive and not very, yeah, helpful.

Rosie Hancock: 38:35

Shani, you're the co-editor of a Sociological Review monograph that came out this year, which is titled Reimagining Menopause, and I just wanted to ask you how you see menopause, its kind of culture, the discourse around it, its commodification, like stuff on perimenopause is everywhere. As a 40-year-old woman, I can tell you, I am right in the centre of, the algorithm has got my number, but I'm curious how, you know, where, where do you think menopause might fit in this conversation around confidence and vulnerability?

Shani Orgad: 39:12

Yeah, I think it's a great question, and and in many ways I think it's a really illustrative site where those two imperatives and, and the culture of confidence materialise, you know. So I think fundamentally the visibility of menopause that has been kind of really, really rising in the last couple of years, in particularly the UK and the US, but also now elsewhere, as our special issue shows, you know, because it has an international kind of scope to it, that the visibility of menopause is very much about you know showing your vulnerability. So, talking about your hot flushes or your brain fog, and about the general kind of both physical symptoms and psychological symptoms. But again, what is striking, particularly with its hyper commodification, is how the imperative to embrace menopause, own menopause, is very much tethered and articulated within discourse of confidence. So it's about individualising it, yeah, it's about, it's your thing, you should own it. And by the way, there's a range of products here that can help you, you know, if you go now to the supermarket, it's crazy. There's a section of you know moisturisers, hand cream for menopause recently I saw that. And as I said about in the same way that confidence culture really benefited and in a way rode on the kind of visibility of feminism, I think so too the visibility of menopause is very much part of and a product of the idea that, you know, women's inequality should address, should be addressed and should be recognised and so on. So it's instrumental, for instance, to making changes around helping and supporting menopausal women in the workplace. But then, when we look at it in greater detail, you see how this support is far less or rarely seriously and deeply structural, and it is about individual adjustments and individual changes and encouraging women employees or women in different contexts to, quote unquote, fix themselves.

Rosie Hancock: 41:42

Yeah, I mean, so I want to turn now to a little chat about pop culture because, so you know, I think so much of your work on, on this is drawing on things that are in the cultural, you know, pop culture arena anyway. So I was thinking about how vulnerability is represented and changes over time. So the show The Bear, right, is like such a huge hit and all of the different characters are vulnerable in their own way, you sort of see that kind of playing out in the show. And I was contrasting this to The Sopranos, which I loved back in the day, and you know the whole conceit of The Sopranos was that Tony Soprano has a panic attack and has to go to a therapist, right? So in a way, it was this groundbreaking, here is a, here is an antihero who is also vulnerable. But the whole point of that show was to, Tony Soprano didn't want to be vulnerable. He was trying to overcome his vulnerability and hide it so that he could remain the strong man. Whereas in The Bear, there's this kind of different character arc, particularly someone like, for people who know really interested in the way vulnerability is represented on these shows and the shift that we're seeing across time and I'd love to hear your reflections on some of this.

Shani Orgad: 43:14

Yeah, you know, I'm no expert on either of these shows.

Rosie Hancock: 43:17

You might not have watched either.

Shani Orgad: 43:18

No, no, I watched both of them. The one thing I would say is, is interesting, and I think you're right, I think the one thing I would say is interesting is that these are both shows where the character is White male.

Rosie Hancock: 43:32

Oh yeah.

Shani Orgad: 43:33

So, I think the articulation of vulnerability, you're right, have changed. I do think, my sense is that still in pop culture and in popular television, women's vulnerability is articulated differently and still there is less, if you wish, legitimacy for women. So yes, they are vulnerable to an extent, particularly more perhaps in commercial culture, these are both also, you know, kind of shows that are very different in terms of their, yeah, both kind of, you know, their acclaim. But it's interesting, I think there are different kind of ways in which vulnerability, as well as confidence, are articulated in relation to men and women. And I think with men, it's often both in relation to vulnerability. I think you're right about The Bear that he does embrace it and so on. But I think what we have seen in confidence culture, for instance, in relation to men, is that even when men there is in, in, in popular culture admission or recognition of men's vulnerability, it's often far more contained around behaviour and thought, and then the ways in which men can embrace it, but also overcome it through mastering a series of steps. Whereas, I think for women, it's profoundly psychological, and it's there for 24/7 and it often also involves hyper vigilance and self-policing. So, I think also the kind of permission to embrace vulnerability is different for male characters and female characters. But that's, you know, I don't want to say too much on something I haven't, you know, kind of researched. It's more just like yeah sharing with you my, yeah.

Rosie Hancock: 45:29

Yeah, yeah. And, and in the same vein I'm curious– just, just a sort of like a final reflection – if there's someone that you think is performing vulnerability well, perhaps like subversively, let's say, despite the hazards.

Shani Orgad: 45:45

Yeah, you know, I, it's, it's a few years now, but you know, I really, really liked shows like The Maid. I don't And I thought it was very much, you know, you know if you - know centred the vulnerability of its main character, but I

Rosie Hancock: 45:58

Oh yes, yeah. think the, the reason I really appreciated and liked it is that it's always situating this vulnerability in the structural conditions. So, to me, part of subversive would be actually again thinking and really centring the connection between one's personal vulnerability and experience and the social forces that have conditioned and furnished it, but also the ways in which the individual might be able to affect these changes, you know, not just to their own lives but to the structural conditions. Yeah, okay. So, The Maid, for reference, was a TV show from a few years ago about a young mother who escapes an abusive relationship, and we're going to put links to that in our show notes along with all the other things that we've touched on. Thanks so much, Shani. It's been so lovely to talk to you.

Shani Orgad: 46:56

Thank you very much for having me. It's an honour.

Rosie Hancock: 47:00

The Sociological Review monograph Shani co-edited, Reimagining Menopause, is out now. You can find it via our website and in the show notes. And as we head towards our 50th episode, do consider donating to support the making of this show, particularly if you're a regular listener. You can do that over at donorbox.org/uncommon-sense. And why not also fill out the listener survey that's in our show notes? As we always mention, the Sociological Review Foundation is a charity hard at work promoting sociology and its potential not only in academia but far beyond. And we're very grateful for your support. Back next month with a show on reconstruction. Thanks to Alice Bloch, our producer, and Dave Crackles who mixes this show. Bye.