Girl power and ‘selfie humanitarianism’

Abstract

The aim of this article is to examine the ‘turn to the girl’ and the mobilization of ‘girl power’ in contemporary global humanitarian and development campaigns. The paper argues that the ‘girl powering’ of humanitarianism is connected to the simultaneous depoliticization, corporatization, and neo-liberalization of both humanitarianism and girl power. Located in broad discussions of campaigns around Malala, Chime for Change and the Girl Effect, the paper seeks to understand the construction of girls as both ideal victims and ideal agents of change, and to examine the implications of this. It suggests that this shift is intertwined with what we call ‘selfie humanitarianism’ in which helping others is intimately connected to entrepreneurial projects of the self, and is increasingly figured less in terms of redistribution or justice than in terms of a makeover of subjectivity for all concerned. The structure of the paper is as follows. First we consider the literature about the depoliticization of humanitarian campaigns in the context of neoliberalism and the growing significance of corporate actors in the world of international aid and disaster relief. Next we examine similar processes in the commodification and export of discourses of ‘girl power’. We then argue that these have come together in the emerging ‘girl powering of development’ (Koffman and Gill 2013), a cocktail of celebratory ‘girlafestoes’ and empowerment strategies often spread virally via social media; celebrity endorsements; and corporate branding which stress that ‘I matter and so does she’ and elide the differences between pop stars and CEO of multinational corporations on the one hand, and girls growing up poor in the global South on the other. Our paper focuses on contemporary examples from the Girl Up campaign. The paper argues that far from being ‘post’ girl power, global humanitarian and development discourses constitute a new and instensified focus upon the figure of the girl and a distinctive, neo-colonial, neoliberal and postfeminist articulation of girl power.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

^1. Current address: Research Associate, Healthwatch Essex, Feering, UK. Email: [email protected]

^2. Email: [email protected]

^3. Moda Vive, vivadressup.com. Accessed February 18, 2014.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ofra Koffman

Ofra Koffman Research Associate at Healthwatch Essex and previously held postdoctoral positions at the LSE and King's College London. Her work is located at the intersection between the study of gender, girlhood, new media and development policy. The most recent research project examined Nike's ‘the Girl Effect’ initiative and associated virals and online campaigns. Publications arising from this project and from previous work appeared in a range of journals and books, including Feminist Review, Journal of Medical Humanities, History of the HumanSciences and the edited collection Youth Cultures in the Age of Global Media.

Shani Orgad

Shani Orgad is Associate Professor at the Department of Media and Communications, LSE. She writes and teaches on representation and globalization, suffering, war and conflict in the media, and gender and the media. She explores these issues in her books Media Representation and the Global Imagination (Polity 2012), Storytelling Online: Talking Breast Cancer on the Internet (Peter Lang 2005), in various journal articles, and a research project on humanitarian communication, which she co-directs.

Rosalind Gill

Rosalind Gill is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at City University London. She researches issues of power and inequality connected to media and digital culture. Her books include Gender and the Media (Polity Press 2007), New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Subjectivity (with Christina Scharff, Palgrave 2011; and Gender and Creative Labour (in press)). She is currently writing a book with Meg Barker and Laura Harvey about the mediation of intimate relationships.