"Intimate Publics": Promises of Campaigns for Girls' Empowerment

• In Event: 35.037 - Contesting and Embodying Modernity/Islam: Education and Development Paradigms in Nigeria, Pakistan, Mali, and the United States

Abstract

Objectives:
Scholars have written about the ideological and discursive effects of the ‘turn to the (school)girl’ in the field of development (Switzer 2009 and 2010; Zakaria, 2014). In this paper I contribute to this conversation by exploring the practices of activism encouraged by campaigns for girls’ empowerment and the kinds of communities that are created in and through them. I explore the affects that cohere around the assemblage of third world schoolgirls, who are often the objects of these campaigns.

Data Sources:
I focus on two campaigns: The first campaign is Barneys New York’s campaign for The Malala Fund that began in 2014, according to which, fashion designer Maria Cornejo and Barneys would donate 10 percent of sales from Maria’s collection to The Malala Fund (Rudisill, 2014), and the twitter campaign, BringBackOurGirls, in response to the kidnapping of schoolgirls in Nigeria.

Theoretical Framework:
To examine how these campaigns create particular forms of activism/activist communities, I rely on Berlant’s (2011) conceptualization of ‘intimate publics,’ that shows how strangers can form communities through affective ties. This concept is helpful as it allows me to explore the kinds of attachments that are formed around the figure of the third world schoolgirl in these campaigns.

Methods:
I draw on Ahmed’s (2010) methodology of tracing feelings by tracking particular words in twitter, facebook, and campaigns website. I track the words: empowerment, schoolgirl, and girl power, and investigate who gets affiliated/associated with them, the histories that these words allude to, and the communities they seek to create to support girls’ education to help women in the third world.

Results:
The campaigns encourage practices of consumption and participation that be read as “commodity feminism” (Goldman, 1991) in the case of the Barneys campaign and ‘hashtag feminism’ in the case of the BringBackOurGirls campaign. In both cases, through consumption of fashion article or news, we become part of a collectivity or an “intimate publics” (Berlant, 2011) that seems to have certainty about the lives of girls in the global south as well as its role in alleviating in their suffering. The emancipated/developed third world girl becomes the “happy object” (Ahmed, 2010) of these campaigns and our collective practices, and girls’ education seems to be central for creating intimate publics or defining the third world empowered subject. Yet, Berlant’s (2011) conceptualization of ‘intimate publics’ also points to broader implications about being part of a collective. An intimate publics assumes that those who are affectively brought together also share worldviews and orientations towards the objects of concern. In the case of empowerment campaigns then we are enrolled in histories where the subject position of third world girl is crucial for the coherence of the assemblage of empowered/developed/first world girl. Contemporary forms of activism for girls’ empowerment which often do not seek to dismantle structural inequities can, therefore, be read as attachments to the idea to ‘empowered girls.’

Significance:
I highlight the ways in which we are connected affectively to histories of colonialism and development through contemporary campaigns for girls’ empowerment.

Author

• Shenila Khoja-Moolji, Teachers College, Columbia University