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Postfeminist Politics and Global Girl Effects: Notes of Rural Maasai Schoolgirls' Experiences
(Special Event)
The idea of 'girl effects'--the purported outward ripple of positive social and economic benefits resulting from targeted investment in adolescent girls--is currently the most persuasive and pervasive discourse in circulation about girls and girlhood in the poverty contexts of the Global South. Dr. Heather Switzer's presentation will first offer a critical transnational feminist analysis of this discourse in order to consider the implications of positioning girls and young women as "the most powerful force of change on the planet" (Nike Foundation, 2015). Using examples from her qualitative research with rural Maasai primary schoolgirls in Southern Kenya, she will highlight the ways in which their everyday experiences both reflect the possibilities of girl effects logic and challenge its seamless narrative of empowerment.
Dr. Switzer is an assistant professor of Women and Gender Studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University in Tempe. Her research is situated at the intersections of girls' studies, transnational feminist theory, and critical development studies. Her current book project, "School Girls: Learning Gender and Developing Identity in Contemporary Kenya," brings together analyses of Maasai primary schoolgirls' understandings of education and development in their daily lives with analyses of representations of schoolgirls in development discourse. Her research with rural Maasai schoolgirls, their teachers, and their mothers both supports and troubles the notion of adolescent female exceptionalism for development, a concept rooted in postfeminist ideas about 'girl power' generated in the Global North that characterizes development discourse targeting the 'Third World Girl.'
This presentation is part of the Women and Gender in International Development discussion series. The event is open to the public and light refreshments are provided.
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(540) 231-4297