Death by benevolence: third world girls and the contemporary politics of humanitarianism

Abstract

The bodies of non-White girls are hyper-visible in humanitarian discourses. This article engages in theoretical reflections around the articulation of Whiteness through the body of the third world girl. I curate and examine an archive of texts and visuals from menstrual hygiene and female genital mutilation (FGM) awareness campaigns to show how the figure of the third world girl is materialised simultaneously as deserving of care/protection and as a contaminant/imperfection. These apparently contradictory registers of legibility are possible due to the reiteration of the non-White female body as ontologically dirty, incomplete and an imperfect representation of full humanity. The third world girl then is the constitutive outside of Whiteness, and her production as such conjoins humanitarian protection codes with penalising political regimes. The latter is reflected by new border patrolling initiatives in the US and UK, launched specifically to identify victims of FGM. Such exercises of state power craft racialised bodies for constant interrogation, prodding and, ultimately, ejection. These bodies then become the loci of benevolent necropower and experience slow social death.

International humanitarian narratives of disasters, crises, and Indigeneity

“…Narratives about Indigenous Peoples often misrepresent them through essentialisation, sometimes constructing them as deviant to justify intervention (de Leeuw, Greenwood, and Cameron, 2010 ; Tsai et al, 2020 ). These categories signal the creation of fictionalised enemies, objects/subjects in danger, agents ideally placed to undertake rescue, and social and political needs (Mbembe, 2008 ; Dijkzeul and Sandvik, 2019 ; Khoja‐Moolji, 2020 ). Thus, humanitarianism has emerged as a global discourse that relies and reproduces unequal geopolitical relationships through catastrophic images (and text) about the ‘other’, who are constantly suffering (Tascón, 2017 ).…”

Hidden or hypervisible? Mapping the making of a moral panic over female genital mutilation/cutting

“…Representations of FGM/C which primarily focus on destroyed female sexuality have been critiqued for objectifying women by reducing them to their genitalia (Boddy, 1998). FGM/C campaigns frequently utilise visual metaphors to portray female genitalia, often as infibulated flags or purses positioned to resemble vulvar tissue (Khoja-Moolji, 2020;28 Too Many, 2017), bloodied or cut flowers (Footprints Foundation, 2017;End FGM European Network, 2020) or fruit resembling the shape of the vulva (Al Mansoury in Dawood, 2015). The reduction of the complex practice of FGM/C to female genitalia represents a continuation to imperialist caricatures of African sexualities; historically, African women's bodies were portrayed in particular ways to convey primitivity and savagery to legitimise colonising, civilising missions by the West (Tamale, 2011).…”

“…It has been argued that such narratives about turning a Hidden or hypervisible? Mapping the making of a moral panic over female genital mutilation/cutting 11 blind eye explicitly seek to erase the racial hierarchies which have been a defining feature of FGM/C discourse (Khoja-Moolji, 2020).…”

Disposable Menstrual Products as Law's Objects

“…28 The use of disposable menstrual products as a central component of WASH agendas has been criticized as contributing to Global North/South power dynamics that abject Black and Brown women, constituting "the proper human as the clean, contained, and implicitly White body." 29 At the same time, poverty is a real obstacle to meeting societal expectations of menstrual 'management', and demanding state resources--including products--to address the multi-dimensional inequalities facing menstruators can be an important strategic goal. Bobel and Winkler note that the decision by those in positions of privilege to deny products to women in the Global South that are available to women in the Global North raises complex questions.…”