“Third World” Girls: Gender, Childhood and Colonialism

Abstract

This paper discusses to what extent a view of "third world women" as traditional and oppressed still holds with regard to girls from "developing countries". For that, we recall the criticisms put forward inside feminist studies and make use of the debates about how childhood has been perceived in gender studies, and then approach the issue of girls from the global South. Next, we try to apprehend how girls from the global South have been represented in the recent academic production in this field and, finally, we present some of the results from our fieldworks in Brazil to exemplify how this standardized outlook hinders the understanding of the complexity of the lives of girls situated within their contexts.