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This article argues that gender-equality policy may function to cultivate women's 'psychological capital', that is, psychological traits that assist women in becoming better workers and therefore further the interests of capital. It assesses documents produced by the UK government's Body Confidence Campaign. First, the article finds that the campaign promoted narrow and corporate ideas about gender equality, only treating women's aspiration as valuable if it led them to pursue profitable and traditionally 'male' professions. Second, it finds that despite campaign leaders' criticisms of initiatives that blame women for their own low self-esteem, in practice, the campaign ended up doing exactly this by portraying low confidence as a drain on society and instructing women and girls to 'build resilience'. Finally, the article finds that the campaign allowed companies to receive credit for limited and temporary efforts to appear 'woman-friendly' without overhauling their harmful marketing strategies in the long term.

Many authors have argued that sex-selective abortion (SSA) poses a problem for defenders of reproductive choice: the notion that a woman has "freely chosen" to abort a female fetus becomes problematic when she faces compelling pressure to bear a male child. This argument reflects the broader concern of the reproductive justice movement that mainstream pro-choice discourse has defined "choice" in narrow, legalistic terms, and overlooks the barriers to reproductive choice often faced by poor women and women of color. This article examines recent debates surrounding a proposed ban on SSA in the United Kingdom. It finds that despite attempts by the ban's proponents to make intersectional claims around gender, ethnicity, and class, their arguments also invoke xenophobia by constructing Indian migrants as a threat to "British" values of gender equality. Thus, the article suggests that the concept of disarticulation may fruitfully be used to make sense of such "intersectional" claims.