Teaching the Third World Girl: The Affective Logics of Transnational Media Campaigns

• In Event: The Making of (Non)Citizens: Exploring Race, Citizenship, Education, and the Law

Abstract

In recent years, the bodies of Third World Girls have been branded, marketed, and circulated as a vector of development with the greatest potential, yet facing the most crises. Therefore, youth development interventions are increasingly becoming ‘girled’ (Chant, 2006) as evidenced by the emergence of global campaigns such as The Girl Effect. These campaigns urge transnational corporations (TNCs), non-governmental organizations (NGOs), venture philanthropists, and citizens around the world to turn their attention towards ‘the girl’ as the next tenable solution for uplifting communities and nations out of poverty. The new and improved self-made Third World Girl wears Western standards of 'empowered' feminism. According to Anita Harris (2004), the young woman has been positioned as the ideal neoliberal citizen-subject most adept to serve nation building in the era of late modernity because she embodies flexibility and self-making potential. If young women have become the path through which modern narratives of ‘progress’ can be achieved for the stability of Western nations, Third World Girls are represented as ultimate investments for the progress of Third World states. My paper examines the affective logics (Lormier, 2010) of this regime of truth by examining the public pedagogy (Sandlin, Schultz, & Burdick, 2010) of two transnational media campaigns- Let Girls Learn and Girls Rising- for the education of Third World Girls. This paper interrogates how the education of Third World Girls works as a coherent logic for community and national transformation by carefully attending to its production in virtual spaces.
I investigate this problem through the following research questions: What guarantees about girls’ education do the Let Girls Learn and Girls Rising campaigns mobilize? How are these guarantees produced? I analyze campaign websites, videos, Twitter feeds, and reports through a visual and textual inquiry (Rose, 2013). I argue that Third World Girls are portrayed as ideal global citizens-in-making and illustrate how neoliberal discourses paired with postfeminist fictions govern the knowledges, skills, and aspirations infused in the public pedagogies of girls’ education campaigns. I posit that transnational media campaigns generate empathy for and hope in the promise of the distant Third World Girl. These feelings are tethered with pity, fear, and self-fulfillment, and thereby fix unequal affective relationships.

Author

• Karishma Desai, Teachers College, Columbia University