Hashtagging girlhood: #IAmMalala, #BringBackOurGirls and gendering representations of global politics

ABSTRACT

This article explores how gendered, racial and youth-ed concepts of girlhood shape the way conflict, violence and the lived experiences of girls in conflict-affected environments are understood globally. In particular, it examines the broader context and effect of social media campaigns that specifically invoke a concept of “girlhood” in their responses to crisis or tragedy. It focuses on two hashtags and their associated social media campaigns: #IAmMalala, started in response to the attempted killing of Pakistani education activist Malala Yousafzai in 2012 by Taliban gunmen, and #BringBackOurGirls, started by Nigerians and adopted globally in response to the kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls by terrorist group Boko Haram. In both instances, understandings of the broader political context are shaped by the focus on girls. Both hashtags also appropriate an experience: claiming to be Malala and claiming the Nigerian girls as ours. Through this exploration, I argue that particular ideals of girlhood are coded within these campaigns, and that these girls’ experiences are appropriated. I critique the limited representations of girlhood that circulate in these discussions, and how these limited representations demonstrate the problematic narrowness of dominant conceptions of girlhood.

KEYWORDS:

• Girlhood
• activism
• social media
• Malala Yousafzai
• Chibok girls

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this article was presented at the IFJP Conference at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia in 2015, where useful feedback from the audience helped sharpen the ideas presented here. Many thanks to Brendan Keogh, Benjamin Abraham, Cassandra Cross, Bridget Lewis and the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive and engaged feedback, which helped greatly in clarifying the argument presented here. My sincere thanks also to the Enloe Award Committee members for their valuable comments on, and support for, this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Helen Berents is a lecturer in the School of Justice, Faculty of Law at Queensland University of Technology. Helen’s research explores representations of youth in political events and engages with the lived experiences of violence-affected young people. More broadly, she is interested in questions of how people are rendered insecure by institutions of authority and power, how young people are politicized but not political and how feminist and narrative methodologies open space to find the everyday within these explorations.

ORCiD

Helen Berents http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1331-3308

Notes

1. The group’s full name is Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad (JAS), but is commonly known as and referred to as Boko Haram which translates as “(western) education is forbidden.”

2. There is a third characterization of girlhood that circulates through media, and that is of the dangerous, delinquent girl. Such a characterization is much more commonly seen in relation to boys – an affinity to violence and a potential for uncontrollability are more frequently coded and read as masculine. It is for this reason that this characterization is less visible, and even when it is – such as when girls chose to fight as soldiers – the girls are described as “brainwashed” or simply as “victims,” fitting them back into one of the supposed “appropriate” categories of girls’ experience.

3. This logic is seen impeccably in another social media campaign: #Kony2012, where the image of traumatized, upset Ugandan child Jacob was the motivation used by Americans (and other youth and adults of the Global North) to call on the US government to intervene militarily in Uganda and “get” the leader of the LRA, Joseph Kony.

4. It should also be noted that a champion of Malala, UN Special Envoy for Education Gordon Brown, was previously Prime Minister Gordon Brown who endorsed the invasion of Iraq, which undeniably led to the strengthening of the Taliban in the Swat Valley.

5. The idea of bodies/girls being “made legible” comes from an excellent article by Brager (2015, 1664) in which she talks about the way social media captured and circulated the death of a Lebanese teen in a suicide attack.

6. Rahmen (2014, 162–163) notes that the other two girls received treatment in Pakistan, and reported a lack of assistance: “[d]espite promises from the federal government that the other two girls injured in the attacks would be taken care of and treated at the best hospitals, no one from the federal government contacted the families … The reality was that Kainat was not Malala, and perhaps no one felt that more than Kainat and her other classmate injured that same day.”

7. Examples of the range of uses of the hashtag beyond individual tweets include a change.org petition started by a Nigerian girl expressing “solidarity:” “hoping, wishing and praying that all efforts being put into rescuing them” that had over one million signatures when closed; Amnesty International’s bringbackourgirls.tumblr.com encouraging people to post selfies holding a sign with the hashtag as a “Solidarity Photo;” and the website bringbackourgirls.us – which emerges as the top choice for a Google search for the term – a website “operated by a team of volunteers that started in California” that shares “credible” news stories and creates resources for individuals to hold “actions” (normally awareness-raising rallies) around the world.

8. It is important to note that the reduction of girls’ worth to their relationship to others in media and politicians’ statements is a profoundly dehumanizing framing. To consider the value of a girl, to evaluate the level of her need, or justify intervention or assistance, because she is “someone’s daughter or sister” deprives her of political subjecthood.