Post-Feminist Spectatorship and the Girl Effect: “Go ahead, really imagine her”

Abstract

Additional information:Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details.

‘Once My Relatives See Me on Social Media… It Will be Something Very Bad for My Family’: The Ethics and Risks of Organizational Representations of Sporting Girls From the Global South

“…For many, the turn towards so-called 'positive' representations of girls from the global South may seem an improvement. Yet, a growing number of feminist scholars are arguing that this new positive imagery paradigm is "fraught with tensions and unintended consequences" (Koffman, Orgad & Gill, 2015, p. 159;Calkin, 2015;Wilson, 2011Wilson, , 2015. In particular, Wilson (2011) examines the "specific and gendered ways" in "'Once my relatives see me on social media… it will be something very bad for my family': The Ethics and Risks of Organizational Representations of Sporting Girls from the Global South" by Thorpe H, Hayhurst L, Chawansky M Sociology of Sport Journal © 2017 Human Kinetics, Inc. which "more recent visual productions are racialised", exploring, in particular, "parallels and continuities between colonial representations of women workers and today's images of micro-entrepreneurship within the framework of neoliberal globalisation" (p. 315).…”

“…Others have located such trends at the intersection of neoliberalism and postfeminist discourses (of female empowerment and girl power), arguing that the 'girl' in these visual representations is in fact always understood in relation to, and in contrast with, her already empowered Northern counterpart (Calkin, 2015;Koffman & Gill, 2013;Switzer, 2013;Wilson, 2015). For example, Switzer (2013) draws upon the work of postfeminist media scholars such as McRobbie (2009) and Gill and Scharff (2011) to present a "(post)feminist development fable of adolescent female exceptionalism seeded in representations of young female sexual embodiment" that has come to "define expert and popular knowledge about the inter-dynamics of girls' education, gendered social change, and economic growth" (p. 350).…”

“…Similarly, for Koffman, Orgad and Gill (2015), the new and intensified focus upon the figure of the girl in global humanitarian and development communications is revealing of a "distinctive, neo-colonial, neoliberal and postfeminist articulation of girl power" (p. 157). They argue that the rise in postfeminist discourses and the turn towards posthumanitarian communication styles that move away from emotion-oriented campaigns to the privileging of low-intensity emotions and short-term forms of agency "'Once my relatives see me on social media… it will be something very bad for my family': The Ethics and Risks of Organizational Representations of Sporting Girls from the Global South" by Thorpe H, Hayhurst L, Chawansky M Sociology of Sport Journal © 2017 Human Kinetics, Inc. (Chouliaraki, 2010; also see Calkin, 2015), have "come together in the emerging 'girl powering' of humanitarian discourses-a cocktail of celebratory 'girlafestoes' and 'empowerment strategies' often spread virally via social media, celebrity endorsements, and corporate branding" (p. 158). Koffman, Orgad and Gill (2015) and Wilson (2011) both locate the rise in 'positive' representations of girls and women from the global South within the "depoliticization, corporatization, and neoliberalization of humanitarian communications" (Koffman, Orgad and Gill, 2015, p. 158).…”

Globalizing ‘Girl Power’: Corporate Social Responsibility and Transnational Business Initiatives for Gender Equality

“…7 Moreover, the effort to re-brand Nike as a company dedicated to the economic empowerment of girls and young women is troubling, given the company's history of subcontracting to firms which employ child labour. This resonance is a notable silence in the Girl Effect discourse, however, as the mode of empowerment presented in the Girl Effect narrative takes place through community-based entrepreneurship, far removed from the factories where Nike products are manufactured (see Calkin, 2015a Firms are acutely aware of the 'dilemma' for growth that they face, wherein they aim to increase the global reach of their products while confronting public resistance towards big business and the forces of globalization; companies are increasingly using branding to address this dilemma, linking products to a particular cause and encouraging consumers to use 'the power of consumerism' to finance their cause (Dauvergne and Lebaron, 2014, p. 52). The adoption of voluntary codes of conduct similarly legitimises corporate social responsibility as 'good governance', even as it works to institutionalize and de-politicise anti-corporate struggles (Soederberg, 2007).…”

Strategic and Operational Levels of CSR Marketing Communication for Sustainable Orientation of a Company: A Case Study from Bangladesh

“…One aspect of developing a company's CSR actions is the issue of women's empowerment. Over the past decade, the growing concern by businesses to develop CSR initiatives has coincided with the emergence of women and girls as public 'faces' of international development [12]. One of the approaches to women's empowerment is through entrepreneurship.…”