Missionary girl power: saving the ‘Third World’ one girl at a time

Abstract

Deborah Ellis’s The Breadwinner is a popular young adult novel about Muslim girls. In this paper, we offer an analysis of the representation of Muslim girls and women in the book as well as responses from undergraduate students enrolled in a children’s literature course to these constructions. Building on the work of postcolonial feminism (specifically the concept of paternalistic care) and critical pedagogy (the role of popular cultural texts as education), we argue that The Breadwinner, and similar historical fictions aimed at youth, wittingly or unwittingly focus on the real and/or imagined plight of ‘other’ girls/women. These representations build upon a care ethic central to the project and history of schooling in the West that in turn results in the stabilisation of colonial relations of domination between white women/girls and colonised women/girls.

Keywords:

• postcolonial
• feminism
• education
• literature
• Middle East
• Islam

Notes

1. There were two data sources from which the student quotes in this paper are taken. First, a two‐ to three‐page written response to The Breadwinner in which students responded to the novel in relation to an academic article (Sensoy 2009; Whitlock 2007). The second, an in‐class response to the prompt ‘How have you been educated to look upon, think about and understand those who are (or assumed to be) from there?’ (Sensoy 2009) ‘Where did these ideas/story lines come from in your own experience? Be specific (name an event, an image, a text)’. After collecting student responses, we each read student the data separately – one of the authors teaches the course and the other has never met the students – for themes and organised our analysis around how students read representations of Muslim girls and women in The Breadwinner. The data were read as a whole and the unit of analysis is student responses in their entirety. Our students’ readings of the novel are partial and rooted in the classroom context in which they responded. We make no claims that our interpretations, or those of our students, are authoritative readings of this novel.

2. Three Cups of Tea is now marketed to readers on Greg Mortenson’s website (http://www.threecupsoftea.com/) in three different versions, one for adults, one for adolescents and a picture book, Listen to the Wind, for younger readers.

3. Mohanty revised ‘Under Western Eyes’ in 2002; however, we use her original terms ‘Western’, ‘Third World’ and ‘First World’ in this article. As Mohanty points out, ‘the terms Western and Third World retain a political and explanatory value in a world that appropriates and assimilates multiculturalism and “difference” through commodification and consumption’ (2002, 505).

4. See http://www.girleffect.org.

5. See http://www.unfoundation.org/press-center/press-releases/2009/world-economic-forum-gives.html.

6. See http://www.care.org/getinvolved/iampowerful/intro.asp.

7. See http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/asr/v009/9.1overview.html.

8. See http://www.littlewomenforlittlewomen.com/.