Anticipating Secure Futures: The Promises of Moral Girlhoods and Quantified Data

• In Event: Economizing Life Through Educational Reforms: The Reconfiguration of Racialized Hierarchies and Differential Human Worth

Abstract

Adolescent girls are constructed as being in tremendous peril, but also as vessels of potential who can become catalysts for community uplift and national economic progress. The move to value and govern life in terms of its ability to foster the macro-economy of the nation-state is what Michelle Murphy (2017) terms “the economization of life.” This “girling of human capital” (p. 5) is situated within an imperialist trajectory of development history, where racial evolutionary logics have been remapped onto a register of economic temporality (Murphy, 2017). This paper explores how the kind of girlhood promoted by transnational media campaigns and empowerment curricula depends upon infrastructures of counting and affect designed to maintain the security (or feelings of safety) of imperial states.

To examine the kind of girlhood designated as necessary for secure, hopeful futures, the paper draws on analysis of policy and media campaigns from a US government intervention, as well as ethnographic data from a girl empowerment program operated by an international non-governmental organization (iNGO) in India. I illustrate how the discourses within and affects generated by these policies, campaigns, and curricula fashion certain girlhoods as valuable and able to produce desirable futures, and render other subjectivities disposable. The allure of investing in the girl is linked to the anticipation of futures that are further along a continuum of economic development. Underlying these reforms is the dangerous premise that if the human capital of the racialized girl is developed, she will transform her “underdeveloped” community and nation. Investments—both financial and affective—in this premise ultimately work to maintain what Grewal (2017) calls Western imperial security states.

My analysis underscores how transnational humanitarian campaigns and interventions make their promised futures dependent on the development of a particular kind of girlhood as a form of human capital that can stimulate both economic and moral progress. First, gendered discourses about their inherent morality idealize girls as prime neoliberal subjects. The campaigns emphasize the need to catalyze moral qualities such as resiliency and a responsibility towards community that are naturalized as dormant within girls. Second, as girls have been positioned as the key to development’s future, there is an intensified imperative to collect more data on girls in order to produce ideal female subjects. I examine how new epistemic infrastructures fortify the economization of life as educational programs establish data gathering mechanisms to refine points of correlation (e.g., between investments and results) and to identify the right kinds of drivers. These data gathering initiatives further constrain the kinds of female subjectivities designated as useful for economic growth.

The paper contributes to examining the ontological assumptions shaping educational interventions by demonstrating how the affective appeal of the empower-able girl-child and the urgency for data about her are stitched together by promises of secure futures in times of precarity and uncertainty. I demonstrate how the promotion of self-empowerment regimes to invest in racialized girls generates new forms of preemptive governance designed to fortify the feelings of safety and economic futures of imperial security states.

Author

• Karishma Desai, Rutgers University