“Girls” in Crisis: Colonial Residues of Transnational School Reforms in Kenya

• In Event: Making the neo-colonizer: strategies and tactics of subjectification for development

Proposal

Girls’ education is continually offered as a salve to the global South that will alleviate poverty, prevent terrorism, and curb gender-based violence. A paradox of this discourse is that “the girl” is made up as both a victim of these forces and the vector for meaningful change (see, e.g., Khoja-Moolji, 2018; Moeller, 2018). This paper historicizes some of the practices that oblige “the girl” to learn the skills, competencies, and character traits—such as curiosity, adaptability, initiative, and grit—that her family, community, and nation are assumed to lack . We explore how these social scientific judgments are not innocent, but act in the world through policy and practice—producing and sifting subjectivities that matter from those seen as dangerous or disposable (i.e., the aged, the male, the infirm, the disabled, the defiant).

The paper draws upon a historicizing approach that crisscrosses different disciplinary and methodological traditions (see, e.g., Gomez Caride, 2017; Sobe, 2018) in order to make visible the principles and practices that give “the girl crisis” intelligibility in transnational school reforms. Juxtaposing curriculum reforms in Kenya in past and present, we analyze the gendered discourses of colonial welfare schemes shifted to focus on fostering nations’ economic potential—embodied in the exceptionality of “the girl.” 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” is situated within an imperialist trajectory of development history, where racial evolutionary logics have been remapped onto a register of economic temporality (p. 5).

Our preliminary analysis suggests that 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 progress. First, we have found gendered discourses about girls extol their inherent morality and mark them as exceptional subjects for reform. Second, while girls are extolled for their moral virtue, they are continually found to lack particular qualities of reason necessary for the realization of development projects. Third, girls are continually positioned as a subjectivity about which insufficient knowledge exists and which justifies an intensified imperative to collect more data on girls in order to produce not only the subjects desired by development, but to catalyze development itself.

Historicizing the “girl crisis” that animates calls for girls’ education in international development discourses today is not to suggest a one-to-one comparison with colonial-era efforts. Rather, the historical juxtaposition and entangling makes visible the ways in which contemporary reforms hailing the girl and girls’ education carry in them a desire of who one is and should be that risk ethicizing the epistemic infrastructures and hierarchies of expertise of imperialism—rather than challenging colonial orderings of subjectivities and knowledge. The uncritical consumption of the girls’ crisis draws the line that divides global South from North, configuring one as abject supplicant in perpetual risk and the other as objective expert obligated to intervene and rescue.

Authors

• Karishma Desai, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

• Christopher Mark Kirchgasler, The University of Kansas