Letting Girls Learn, Letting Girls Rise: The Production of Humanitarian Citizens and Their Others

• In Event: 75.042 - MTCC Roundtable Session 34
  In Roundtable Session: 75.042-1 - Producing Disciplined State Subjects: Intersectional Analyses of Race and Citizenship

Abstract

This paper analyzes how transnational media campaigns for girls’ education construct US citizens into humanitarians emboldened by the will to rescue and to save. Everyday citizens are lured into these media campaigns as activists working for the cause of girls’ education. They are positioned as key figures in letting girls learn and letting girls rise. The campaigns’ appeal to everyday citizens mobilizes attachments to the promises of girls’ education by generating public feelings of concern and feelings of possibility linked to their role in solving what is constructed as a major humanitarian issue of our time. And thereby, the campaigns’ outreach strategies problematically work to fashion US citizens into ‘everyday activists’ through the commodification of disadvantaged girlhoods. They engender feelings of hope about the latent potential of girls from the global South, and the significant role of everyday activists in manifesting this potential. Both campaigns analyzed in this paper illustrate the power of everyday citizens acting on behalf of girls and centralize US volunteers as essential components of the solution.
I argue that a density of concern is created through stories on campaign websites and blog posts, repeated statistics, and Twitter hashtags. These stories, statistics, and tweets become contagious affective bodies that expand geographically, generate kinetic forces, and envelop particular spaces. This concern is paired with hopeful feelings attached to the change that can be catalyzed through simple actions everyone can take, such as tweeting, posting Instagram pictures, and making small donations. Such online humanitarian activism involves gazing at and producing oneself as a charitable and compassionate subject through “the humanitarianization of the public sphere, a public rendered private through citizens’ feelings turned inside out” (Muehlebach 2012, p. 46). Feelings are made public through social media outlets, charity events, and classroom curriculum aimed at the commodified girl-child.
Feelings of concern are eased with feelings of possibility. Both campaigns analyzed emphasize that while conditions for girls in countries around the world are dismal, change is possible, and everyday citizens are vital in making this change happen. Neoliberal and neocolonial inflections of Western humanitarian self-fashioning and self-interest are at play in everyday activists’ participation in the attempt to save girls in the global South, Yet, I illustrate how new phases of humanitarian and international development regimes cannot be reduced to an operation of neoliberal rationality. Rather, for neoliberal regimes to operate, neoliberal reason merges with affect through which feelings of concern and possibility produce humanitarian citizens and their commodified Others.

Author

• Karishma Desai, Teachers College, Columbia University