Suturing Together Girls and Education: An Investigation Into the Social (Re)Production of Girls’ Education as a Hegemonic Ideology

Khoja-Moolji, Shenila

doi:10.1080/15595692.2015.1010640

Cited by 33 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…This paper offers accounts of girls’ schooling and childhoods which subvert (inter)national development narratives that posit ‘girls’ education as a ‘commonsensical’ solution to issues as wide-ranging as poverty, fertility, human trafficking, and terrorism in the global south.’ (Khoja-Moolji, 2015: 87) In theorising the gendered nature of ‘childhood’ in urban India, it opens up both schooling and childhood to much-needed analyses of the interplay between economic informality, liberalisation, the changing role of the state and caste patriarchy (Khoja-Moolji, 2015; Sriprakash, 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This discourse has been perfectly encapsulated in the ‘girl effect’ movement that was launched by the Nike Foundation and the NoVo Foundation to target poor girls in ‘third world’ countries as beneficiaries of western aid and investment. Ideas and slogans like, ‘poverty ends with her’ and ‘invest in a girl and she will do the rest’ (Shain, 2013) showcase the girl child as a specific kind of economic agent and justify the ‘marked policy and investment shift towards girls and their access to schoo[ling]’ (Khoja-Moolji, 2015: 94) as ‘smart economics’ (Shain, 2013). Schooling is expected to produce this girl as a more productive wage labourer and entrepreneur, and a smart mother and wife who will have fewer children and manage the household budget despite low wages and shrinking welfare.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Theorising gendered childhoods and girls’ schooling: Poverty, patriarchy and girls’ education in urban India

Yunus

2020

Childhood

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This paper offers gendered accounts of girls’ schooling and childhood from urban India. It challenges global ‘girl effect’ narratives by grappling with the interplay of poverty and caste patriarchy and how it shapes families’ struggles and concerns and girls’ (re)productive labour, (un)freedoms and classroom experiences. Moving beyond the notion of ‘multiple childhoods’ it develops a conceptual framework that accounts for the way the state, the market, economic inequalities and local patriarchies inscribe poor girls’ schooling and work. Drawing upon ethnographic work with Class VIII students in a state school it also unpacks girls’ negotiation of classed and casted patriarchies.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Theorising gendered childhoods and girls’ schooling: Poverty, patriarchy and girls’ education in urban India

Yunus

2020

Childhood

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“…The third world girl While for decades it was the third world woman who was the object of humanitarian concern, more recently, the international development regime has converged on the figure of the girl (Khoja-Moolji, 2015a, 2015c. It is assumed not only that girls in the global South are threatened by poverty and disease, but also that they hold the potential to resolve these very issues.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Khoja-Moolji

2019

Feminist Theory

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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.

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“…She is patronized by the very same Western institutions that would claim to be rescuing her while simultaneously rejected by many in her home country who see her as complicit in a Western political project that is anti-Islam and anti-Pakistan. Much has been written about the newly emergent discourses that see powerful actors mobilizing in the name of girls in developing countries (see Khoja-Moolji 2015a;Koffman and Gill 2013;Moeller 2014), yet little has been done to understand how girls negotiate these discourses. In this article I analyze how Yousafzai, addressing her own age group, subverts these discourses by contextualizing her story, challenging assumptions that readers might make about her childhood, and turning the gaze back onto the West.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…The examples given in this article then, are just a few of the many that I could have cited. Without denying that Yousafzai's story, and at times her representation of it, resonate deeply with problematic Western constructions of Muslim societies (Khoja-Moolji 2015a), in this article I analyze the many occasions on which she reclaims her story from those discourses. In highlighting this, I hope to act as an "ally" to girl activists in making the world "a more respectful place for female youth" (Kearney 2009: 22).…”

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confidence: 99%

‘This Is My Story’

Walters¹

2017

Girlhood Studies

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The cause of girls' education in developing countries has received unprecedented attention from international organizations, politicians, transnational corporations, and the media in recent years. Much has been written about the ways in which these seemingly emancipatory campaigns reproduce historical discourses that portray women in former colonies as in need of rescue by the West. However, to date little has been written about the ways in which young women's and girls' education activists represent themselves. In this article I analyze I Am Malala, the autobiography of Pakistani girls' education activist Malala Yousafzai, written for her own age group. Using a feminist, poststructuralist approach to discourse analysis, it considers the way in which Yousafzai negotiates and challenges discourses around young women, Pakistan, and Islam. I conclude that a truly emancipatory understanding of girls' rights would look not to the words and policies of powerful organizations but, rather, to young women themselves. KEYWORDS agency, development, postcolonial, power, rescue, resistance, self-representation In 2014, the year she turned 17, Malala Yousafzai released a second version of her autobiography, rewritten for her own generation, detailing her fight for girls' education. In it, she reflects on her childhood in the Swat Valley in Pakistan, her campaign against the Pakistani Taliban, or Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), their attack on her in October 2012, and her move to the United Kingdom. Having blogged, lobbied politicians, and spoken publicly since a young age, Yousafzai was propelled into international fame after surviving an attack by two TTP gunmen while sitting on the bus home from school. Since then, she has given speeches at the United Nations, made a film, and told her story through countless interviews and in the two versions of her autobiography. Her story resonated in the West in a post-9/11 context of "save the Muslim girl" stories (Sensoy and Marshall 2010: 309; see also

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Suturing Together Girls and Education: An Investigation Into the Social (Re)Production of Girls’ Education as a Hegemonic Ideology

Cited by 33 publications

References 28 publications

Theorising gendered childhoods and girls’ schooling: Poverty, patriarchy and girls’ education in urban India

Theorising gendered childhoods and girls’ schooling: Poverty, patriarchy and girls’ education in urban India

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

‘This Is My Story’

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