ENHOGAR-2016 Cibao Sur 33.9%

I asked the interview participants about whether people at their university tended to be confident, and many participants responded by talking about having themselves overcome an earlier lack of confidence. Similarly to the way participants drew on narratives of progress as a resource in Chapter 6, this resource was drawn on in relation to confidence. In doing so, the participants constructed the ‘ideal young woman’ as someone who is confident by talking about overcoming their own lack of confidence as an improvement.

In this extract, where the participant talks about how she herself got over a lack of confidence, there is a strong implication that a lack of confidence is something to be overcome, which was typical across the interviews:

Extract 1, Interview Participant 1, 1.st interview, campus:

Participant 1: for me (..) for the first semester (.) I wasn’t confident enough to speak 1

up about what I thought about a particular topic in class (..) just 2

because I felt like I would be wrong and I would be laughed at or 3

something but I think that was a personal thing and I got over that. 4

As well as a lack of ‘confidence’ being something to be overcome, in the above extract

the participant links ‘confidence’, or a lack of it, with concerns about being wrong or laughed at. While the connection is not elaborated on, ‘confidence’ is in some non-exact way intertwined with being wrong or laughed at. This may be seen as similar to the idea

163

observed more broadly that women have to be ‘right’ or beyond potential judgement as ‘laughable’ in order to speak. The reluctance to speak up when there was a possibility

she could be wrong, can be interpreted in this light, even though the participant presents this as ‘a personal thing’. When she explains it this way, she clearly locates this issue in the individual, with the added implication that this is also an issue the individual should overcome by herself. In other words, it is not constructed here as a structural

phenomenon, but a personal way of being and thinking. As she goes on to say she ‘got over that’, it can further be seen as an achievement to change oneself to address this issue.

It is also interesting that while the question was asked about people at their university generally, this participant, as did many others, responded with answers about herself. While confidence was treated as a desirable quality, it seems to be a quality that is nonetheless quite vague and more easily talked about with examples from personal lives.

Confidence as simultaneously necessary and vague is referred to by the next participant as well, as she talks about what she would want for a future daughter:

Extract 2, Interview Participant 4, 1.st interview, campus:

Participant 4: So (..) I'd definitely be very careful not to say anything about her 1

appearance or my own appearance that was negative in front of her 2

because I think no matter how academically well you perform I think 3

it all boils down to how confident you are and if you haven’t got any 4

confidence you’re going to really struggle 5

164

In this extract, confidence is something people need, as they are otherwise going to struggle. Confidence is something that can be shaped, it is not a fixed state, but

interestingly, the participant here relates it explicitly to appearance. Negative comments about appearance causes lack of confidence, which is contrasted with doing well

academically, which cannot make up for a lack of confidence. Confidence is thus not derived from doing well academically, but from appearance. It is left unclear what it is the person will struggle with, without confidence, in the example of doing well

academically, but it is clear that women and girls need confidence in a general, if vague, way. When the participant says ‘it all boils down to’ (line 3) it is not clear what the ‘it’ in that sentence refers to. However, the vagueness itself suggests that a discourse of confidence as a crucial characteristic for individuals to possess is so widespread, that it is intelligible to talk about how important it is, without any need to precisely specify how it works, what ‘it’ is it boils down to, or why it is so central. That the extract is intelligible even without precision, shows how the idea of confidence, as a concept and as an ideal, has become widely available as a discursive resource which can be used as explanation, and by extension prescriptively as a solution to potential struggles.

The benefits of confidence are further evident in the following extract:

Extract 3, Participant 5, 1.st Interview, campus:

Participant 5: what happened was we had a speaker come in and she (..) I think on 1

that one it was just about financial stability and so many women 2

opened their eyes hang on a minute I could do this I can do that and I 3

don’t have to be a man I don’t have to have this amount of money (..), 4

I don’t have to look like this or be like that (..) but anybody can do 5

it(..) and in seeing that (..) like I met up with some of them recently 6

(..) I don’t want to say that that changed and made them get good 7

grades but it changed their perception of themselves because before 8

165

that they were saying I would be happy with a two-two and one of 9

them has got a first 10

MP: Ah

11

Participant 5: Because she believed in herself (..) 12

Although this is not directly about struggles people will face if they are not confident, there is an almost evangelical notion that if only young women believe in themselves, they can overcome anything. Confidence and belief in oneself are here presented as an almost magical solution, and you do not need ‘to be a man’, ‘have this amount of money’ or ‘look like this or that’, (lines 3 and 4) as long as you ‘believe in yourself’ (line 10). While she qualifies that she is not claiming that ‘seeing that’ made some people get good grades (lines 5 and 6), she emphasizes that their changed ‘perception of themselves’ (line 7) was linked with getting better degrees than they had would have been happy with before. She further underlines the causal link between confidence and achievement when she adds ‘because she believed in herself’ (line 10).