Between ?Girl Power? and ?Reviving Ophelia?: Constituting the Neoliberal Girl Subject (original) (raw)
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Girl Power: Postmodern girlhood lived and represented
Visual Arts Research, 2011, 2011
To identify the promises, challenges, and paradoxes of the popular discourse of girl power, this article examines girl power as an artifact of postmodernity whose meanings are revealed through both popular cultural representations and contemporary girls’ practices of doing girlhood. Specifically, by examining the representations of girl power in media texts and the drawings and play projects produced by actual girls, it explores the following questions: What aspects of the girl power discourse pose challenges to the very idea of girls’ empowerment? Can traditional feminine qualities and the new emancipated attitude of a power girl coexist? And are girl power opportunities equally accessible to all girls?
Precarious Politics and Girl Effects: Exploring the Limits of the Girl Gone Global
Feminist Formations, 2016
In the paper we consider the compelling intersections of gender, age, and nation in human rights and development discourse aimed at empowering girls in the global South. We show how the concepts of vulnerability and precarity travel transnationally via development discourse and trouble the prominent deployment of adolescent female exceptionalism as the ‘key’ to eradicating global poverty and realizing girls’ human rights. It is our contention that even as adolescent girls are today hypervisible as ideal subjects of neoliberal development, they are also illegible as normative subjects of human rights. Based on our experiences as scholars, activists and artists in Sub-Saharan Africa and the halls of the United Nations, we examine how Kenyan, Ethiopian, and North American girls experience local and transnational expectations animated by the ‘turn to the girl’ for development with differential and sometimes (dis)empowering effects. We ask: what does it mean when members of the world’s ‘most vulnerable’ population, are also positioned as the ‘saviors of humanity’? What does it mean for girls’ rights policy? What about for girls themselves? Taken together, our work suggests girls (in)visibility requires feminists working in transnational spaces to recalibrate our politics and epistemologies. Keywords: development / girls’ education / Girl Effect / human rights / performance / girl power / precarity / United Nations
Oppositional Girlhoods and the Challenge of Relational Politics
Over the last five years, scholars from a wide variety of disciplines have problematized the discourse of “adolescent female exceptionalism” (Switzer, 2013, p. 4) popularized by the NIKE Foundation’s Girl Effect. Arriving at similar conclusions, scholars point to the artificial neocolonial divisions between ‘the West’ and ‘the rest’ of the world animated by an ‘invest in girls’ logic. This paper endeavors to move beyond the “oppositional girlhoods” (Bent, 2013, p. 7) bind of girl effects discourse to propose that differentially positioned and experienced girlhoods might be better understood as transnational, relational cultural formations. Drawing from our empirical research with girls in North America and Sub-Saharan Africa, we consider the implications of girls’ increasing global visibility as the ‘saviors of humanity’ from different geopolitical contexts. We then go further to suggest the oppositional girlhoods frame assumes reductive, apolitical, and ahistorical claims of divergence between girlhoods in the Global North and Global South “with highly unequal effects” (Gonick, Renold, Ringrose, & Weems, 2009, p. 3). By countering the normative construction of global girlhoods as mutually exclusive forms of personhood and historical experience, our project authorizes a new understanding of girlhoods as mutually constituted and relationally contingent. It is from within this relational framework that we propose new directions for thinking about girlhoods transnationally. Keywords: The Girl Effect, oppositional girlhoods, relationality, global girlhoods, neoliberal development
The Girl Effect: A Neoliberal Instrumentalization of Gender Equality
Over the past ten years, 'The Girl Effect'–the discourse and practice of investing in third world girls' education—has ascended to the top of the international development agenda as the 'highest return investment strategy' to end poverty. This paper interrogates the trend by investigating the genealogy of 'The Girl Effect' as The Nike Foundation's flagship corporate social responsibility campaign and the theory of change it is based on. A literature analysis of The Nike Foundation's most recent intervention projects— " The Girl Effect Accelerator " and 'Girl Hub' pilot projects in Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Rwanda—will elucidate the underlying investment logic and serve as a representative sample of the broader emerging practice. While claiming to advance " gender equality " and " women's empowerment " , I argue that The Girl Effect accomplishes the opposite by reinforcing gender inequity on both the micro and macro levels. Feminist grammars are instrumentalized as window dressing to exploit third world females as prospective (1) debtors in the expansion of credit markets, (2) exploits in the expansion of consumer markets, and (3) the 'untapped resource' for cheap labor. An epochal look at second wave feminism will show how 'The Girl Effect Paradigm' is a second wave of neoliberal exploitation—a parallel of its first female-led development era (1980s-1990s). This paper warns that as this phenomenon grows in hegemony it is insidiously displacing feminism as a political project and neutralizing the need for a truly transformational agenda. Without a counterbalance of vigilant public scrutiny and debate, we risk letting it crystallize Western-patriarchal-capitalism even more deeply in an unyielding global glass ceiling.
Girl Culture - An Encyclopedia, 2007
In this chapter we examine the representational terrain of contemporary girlhood in the West, particularly the discursive construction of successful girls, mean girls, bad girls and violent girls. We will explore the core contemporary dilemma foisted upon girls to somehow balance particular versions of masculinity and femininity, through analysis of media, popular culture and psychological and educational debates, and through data from our own empirical research studies with girls. We use feminist, post-structural, post-Foucauldian methods of mapping discursive regulations of femininity, considering in particular how massive concern over girl aggression and mean-ness might be related to current gender anxieties over middle-class "girl power", and girls success We will look at the pathologization of the successful but mean ‘Supergirl’ and the counterpoint to girls’ success – the failed, deviant, abject, violent non-feminine subject who must be transformed.
Theorizing agency in post-girlpower times
Post-structuralist youth studies theorists have argued for nuanced perspectives on agency that are not reliant on an assumption of subjects as rational and internally coherent individuals, and understand subjectivity and social structure as produced in concert. These are important theoretical developments that have shaped recent scholarship on girls' identities and cultures. In this paper, we seek to give them some further sociological grounding by thinking through their resonance for the specific debate about young women and what feminist agency consists of, or looks like today. What we wish to further flesh out is how more familiar, modernist ideas about girls' agency have started to reach their limits not merely because of the post-structuralist turn, but because of the socio-cultural conditions of neoliberalism, post-feminism and post-girlpower. We unpack some recent shifts and complexities around three concepts: choice, empowerment and voice. These are the terms by which the possibility of girls' and young women's agency has traditionally been understood in feminist scholarship and much work in girls' studies. However, when we interrogate these concepts within the specific neoliberal, post-feminist, post-girlpower context, their usefulness for either understanding or enabling feminist agency is thrown into question.