“The Clock Is Ticking”: Undisciplining The Global South Girl and Futurity In International Development Campaigns

• In Event: Towards Undisciplining: Temporality, Objects, and Method in Education Research

Abstract

Objectives and Purpose
In the 1990s, national and international corporations, organizations, and governments adopted the discourse around ‘girl power’, depicting girls as the most promising “untapped resource” for economic development (Chant, 2016a, p. 7) and the “untapped solution” (Calkin, 2015, p. 655) to the world’s problems. Rooted in a white saviorism logic and philanthrocapitalism, that framing positions “Global South” girls as an “object of reform” (Nieves, 2014, p. 37) of philanthropic intervention and a “subject in crisis” (Author & --, 2020) threatened by tradition, patriarchy, local customs, and thus, are unable to fulfill their potential (Khoja-Moolji, 2018). These girls become an “educative spectacle” (Desai, 2016, p. 1), a form of public pedagogy through which they are commodified as visual objects that not only crystallize moral anxieties but also normalize global hierarchies, investment logics, and consumerist ideals under the guise of empowerment. The purpose of this paper is to examine global development campaigns like the Girl Effect by Nike and the Beat the Clock by Plan International as a site where the figure of the Global South girl is spatially, affectively, and temporally constructed, and girlhood is mapped onto a ticking clock that frames it as a temporal crisis. I aim to undiscipline the developmental gaze by disrupting normative discourses that mobilize urgency, crisis, affect, and futurity to shape the “Global South” girlhood imaginary.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
Grounded in a Black feminist and postcolonial critique, I employ chrononormativity, viewed as “the use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity” (Freeman, 2010, p. 3), and power-chronography that sees time “as lived experience, always political, produced at the intersection of a range of social differences and institutions” (Sharma, 2014, p. 15). These frameworks help center time “as a form of power” (Sharma, 2014, p. 10) and interrogate the chronopolitics logics that regulate “Global South” girls’ bodies, lives, and futures.
Modes of Inquiry & Sources
Using a decolonial feminist discourse analysis, I closely read and analyze the websites and materials of these campaigns, including promotional videos, campaign reports, social media posts, and case studies of the girls.

Substantiated Conclusions
I argue that the “Global South” girl is a site of temporal ‘triage’ on whom specific timelines and affective scripts are imposed. Whether framed as “a ticking clock” (Girl Effect) or the subject “who can’t wait 131 years” (Beat the Clock), the girl is affectively produced through temporal logics that organize her life and future into measurable and productive stages. By deploying clock-based metrics and countdowns, the campaigns weaponize time as a disciplining and moralizing tool, reducing complex structural inequalities into time-bound problems, and reinforcing colonial and neoliberal temporalities by foreclosing other ways of being, feeling, imagining, and becoming.

Significance
My paper expands on the literature on “Global South” girlhood, contributing to international development and girlhood studies by bringing temporal, affective, and spatial lenses that are often underutilized in exploring global discourses of girlhood and empowerment. It also calls on counter-temporalities that imagine “Global South” girls outside of a ticking time clock.

Author

• Ramata Diallo, University of Wisconsin - Madison